White Gaze Research Articles

Paso a paso se va muy lejos: Traveling the Path with AFS

<i>Paso a paso se va muy lejos</i>: Traveling the Path with AFS

SPEP Plenary Address

ABSTRACT In Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Stanley Cavell says, the film camera, a “somatogram,” reads fits and fidgets as a post-Cartesian cogito of embodied thinking. Giorgio Agamben sees the cameras of motion studies at Salpêtrière in the 1880s as dehumanizing normalizers of gesture, but Georges Didi-Huberman claims that what they recorded as hysteria was solicited by them and sometimes refused. Which is it? Does the camera humanize, normalize, or solicit gesture? I consider the question with Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits (2015). Like Mr. Deeds, The Fits foregrounds non-sovereign body movements, but its protagonist, Toni, agonistically engages the camera’s gaze, extracting from it the respect she deserves. I argue that Toni may be seen as responding to Salpêtrière, and also to Thomas Eakins, in whose attic, in the 1880s, a young Black girl was photographed naked, on a couch. Is her stare a refusal of the white gaze or a coerced pose? Toni’s own stare suggests she avenges such historic wrongs in acts of cinematic agonism. In The Fits, the camera that might have been Toni’s reader/partner (Cavell), betrayer (Agamben), or groomer (Didi-Huberman) becomes a mystical mechanism of remediation and Toni, the ghost in its machine.

The Militancy of (Black) Memory

In August 2020, prominent race scholar and thinker on anti-racism Ibram X. Kendi wrote an article in the Atlantic titled, “Is This the Beginning of the End of American Racism?” The subtitle read: “Donald Trump has revealed the depths of the country’s prejudice—and has inadvertently forced a reckoning.” Kendi’s words, though likely meant to be a rhetorical device, are one of many examples of the ways that white people’s discovery of racism, anti-Blackness, and, perhaps, Blackness, in general, is often valorized as an indicator of progress toward the democratic ideals so many believe to belie American society and culture. But what does the centering of white discovery mean for Black memory? What does white ignorance demand of Black people? How are Black Americans transcending dominator logics that often hold captive both memory and history-making power? Through a synthesis of Nietzsche’s conception of memory as a site of identity and community formation and Charles Mills’s theory of “white ignorance,” I argue that the log-ics and practices handed down intergenerationally by white Americans through the imperial project of whiteness induce a process of history- erasing and world remaking. Yet, piercing through this deployment of intentional and facilitated white ignorance, collective memory within Black communities, and specifically through Black-led social movements, is a form of militancy and resistance that disrupts the insinuated social order established by mainstream, white supremacist normativity. Of particular importance is the fact that this militancy, an insurgent force that has reverberated across the globe, opens up new avenues for Black world-building, futurity, and political imagination deemed impossible under current carceral conditions, irreconcilable with present-day politics, and incompatible with white-centered notions of justice, liberty, and democratic freedom. Critically, in this moment, as Black Americans are disproportionately harmed by the effects of COVID-19, hypersurveilled in neighborhoods plagued by neoliberal disinvestment, and over-policed en masse, mass movements like Black Lives Matter have disrupted, interrupted, and reoriented the social landscape toward a disconnection in the white supremacist archival practices that have long defined Western postcolonial culture. Now, young Black Americans, in particular, challenge notions of time, lineage, and world-making by rebuking the erasure of Black memory and Black futurity. In fact, it is through this collective memory, in the form of social organizing, community education projects, and other intraracial resistance efforts, that the anti-Black, white supremacist frameworks of ignorance may be dismantled wholesale. As the country continues to grapple with the killings of Black Americans like Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, those most affected by these tragedies have built pathways to open up new spaces for collective memory and mourning. Young Black Americans are engaging in protest and public rage not for the white gaze, but for themselves. As such, this political moment offers us a different vision, one in which those most excluded from history are the history-makers. This global effort toward mass memory-making presents both a theoretical and chronological disjuncture that bends us further toward a future where all Black people are free.

Reclaiming racial dignity: An ethnographic study of how African youth in Australia use social media to visibilise anti‐Black racism

AbstractThe #BlackLivesMatter Movement has amplified the role of social media in visibilising anti‐Black violence. Drawing on the narratives and expertise of those who have experienced anti‐Black racism, this paper employs the theoretical concept of racial dignity to highlight how young African Australians participate in racial discourse on social media. The findings of this paper demonstrate that social media is a significant site where Black African youth reclaim racial dignity through: 1) reversing the white gaze; 2) recognising and calling out anti‐blackness; and 3) cultivating and engaging in communities of healing and belonging. Through these digital practices, Black African youth in Australia foster racial agency that promotes positive self‐recognition, racial resilience and racial dignity. We argue, therefore, that social media offer Black African young people in Australia spaces to engage in positive expressions of Afro‐blackness and challenge anti‐blackness in ways that are safer to them than in physical, offline settings in white contexts.

Racial Illiteracies and Whiteness: Exploring Black Mixed-Race Narrations of Race in the Family

Drawing upon fifty-five interviews with Black mixed-race people located in Britain’s second-largest city, Birmingham, and a nearby satellite town, Bromsgrove, this article critically explores how race, identity, and whiteness, are negotiated in mixed-race families. Whilst existing studies tend to centre upon the experiences of white parents raising their children, in this article, we foreground Black mixed-race perspectives of familial practices. Whiteness can often function as an ever-present non-presence in explorations of mixed identities. We utilise concepts such as white fragility, white complicity and the white gaze to make whiteness visible and to address how racial illiteracies can manifest within everyday family settings. In doing so, we suggest that white family members can, on occasion, participate in processes of white domination even in the smallest everyday acts and conversations that deny, avoid, dismiss and, in some cases, even perpetuate racism. By identifying these moments in Black mixed-race lives, we complicate some of the studies that document the racial literacies of white parents and explore how mistakes are made. We suggest that these encounters can create moments of disjuncture in familial settings that are characterised by a complex layer of love, intimacy and racial difference. By bringing these issues to the fore, we centre the emotional labour it can take on the part of Black mixed-race people to make sense of and resist these experiences whilst simultaneously maintaining closeness within familial relationships.

On the Caesura in Dance: Reading &lt;em&gt;Black Waters&lt;/em&gt; as history at a standstill

The art of dance, as a practice expressed in the body language of the dancer, addresses our bodily existence by resembling it. It has the narrative power to make us, as audiences who inhabit bodies ourselves, rediscover the body as a condition of being human that we all share. This illumination can lead us to look at each other’s bodies with more care. With this premise in mind, I call for a moment in the perception of dance that creates an awareness of the social references enacted in the performance. In my consideration, I focus on dance as evocative of imaginative thought, its stillness as dialectical, in which dance takes on an interrupting quality, and ask: How does the perception of a dancing body influence us as spectators in our thinking about the bodies of others? I read Phoenix Dance Theatre’s performance Black Waters (2020) as a representation of colonial history that sheds light on the visibility of Black identities and how they are read through the White gaze. This article particularises dance as a possibility of encounter that enhances decolonial thinking.

Enslavement and Its Legacies: “Constantly to look at me”

Combining quantitative study with close visual analysis of colonial Virginia portraits, this study argues that white colonists rendered enslaved people invisible in portraiture in an attempt to remove the “right to look” from the Black gaze. Simultaneously, enslaved audiences engaged with portraits in subversive ways, finding ways to “converse” with them and to affirm their own subjectivity. The resulting tension between Black and white gazes on plantations turned the gaze into a material practice through domestic portraiture and affected the function and development of American portraiture.

Unveiling Latin American White multiculturalism: Black women’s politics in Argentina and Costa Rica

ABSTRACT This article proposes theoretical and methodological approaches to researching Whiteness in two countries that embraced Whiteness over mestizaje and adopted ‘late multiculturalism’: Costa Rica and Argentina. We situate our analysis within critical race and Black feminist frameworks, which argue that the construction of White identity cannot exist without the construction of racialized others and that Black women’s experiences and knowledge offer critical vantage points from which to theorize social worlds. We employ a method of juxtaposition to analyze the collision between Black women’s political initiatives and anti-Black racist responses from a White national common sense. The Costa Rican case combines participant observation with critical discourse analysis of press coverage to assess the perception of, and experience of, the first Black woman Vice President, Epsy Campbell, vis-à-vis a White gaze. The Argentinian case includes an ethnographic examination of Black women’s experiences of racism during their participation in feminist organizing. Our analysis reveals the endurance of (foundational) White national ideologies despite the deployment of ‘multicultural’ discourses. We propose the concept of ‘White multiculturalism’ to explain how White Costa Ricans and Argentines simultaneously embrace multiculturalism through progressive policies and rhetoric while maintaining investments in homogeneous Whiteness through everyday institutional and interpersonal practices and interactions.

White Skin and the Black Mask™

White Skin and the Black Mask™

Réflexions sur le « contact » et le « regard » en clinique psychiatrique

GoalsThis article explores the semiological value of contact and of the gaze in clinical practices. It questions the subjectivity involved in the caregiver/patient relationship and in nosography. MethodologyThe authors examine the place of the gaze based on writings of 19th-century alienists. Then, they question the clinician's subjective experience–through the concepts of “sentiment” (Binswanger, Minkowski) and “praecox Gefühl” (Rümke) from the accounts of early stages of the clinical encounter. ResultsThe gaze plays a specific role in the early stages of the clinical encounter, especially in the landscape of schizophrenia. A draft classification of different types of gazes (off-center gaze, white gaze, ecstatic gaze, black gaze) is proposed, then nuanced. DiscussionAny attempt to classify the gaze leads to the deconstruction of any fixed typology. The gaze resists verbalization and even meaning, and in this, belongs to the dimension of anguish, an essential affect in a practice that does not seek to do away with relationship. ConclusionAt a time of increasing research in “eye movement abnormalities” in schizophrenia, it seems essential to renew our interest in the relational and therefore subjective–dimension as a specificity in clinical psychiatry. The gaze, then, would be this area without a place, this primary area of contact where relationship begins… or not.

Mediated Identifications

Mediated Identifications

"We Knew We Were Being Watched": Adultification and Coming of Age in Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn

"We Knew We Were Being Watched": Adultification and Coming of Age in Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn Adam Dawson (bio) Grown women bore signs of ruined girlhood – the cold, hard eyes of having been ripened too soon. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments August, the protagonist of Jacqueline Woodson’s autobiographical novel Another Brooklyn (2016), is an anthropologist studying death rites and rituals around the world. When her father dies, she returns to Brooklyn, where she had spent part of her youth, to attend his funeral. While she is there, a chance encounter with an old friend on the subway causes August to recall her childhood spent with her friends Angela, Gigi, and Sylvia. In this essay, I examine Woodson’s use of stock tropes of Black girls’ coming of age in August’s chronicle. Comparing Woodson’s coming-of-age story to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), I contend that whereas Morrison depicts the dangers the white gaze poses to young Black girls as they are growing up, Woodson shows the perils of the adultifying gaze, which reads Black girls as always already adults and therefore sexually available. In doing so, I borrow from Nazeera Sadiq Wright’s model of the “prematurely knowing Black girl” in nineteenth-century writing, which posits that “extreme hardship and danger hasten the maturation of youthful girls, and the move from youthful to prematurely knowing girlhood.”1 I build on these observations to show that these narrative patterns continue in twenty-first century writing. [End Page 99] Moreover, Woodson’s novel represents an important break from much of the history of African American autobiographical writing, including both autobiographical fiction and autobiography itself, owing to its insistence on deploying the genre to narrate individual character development. Woodson reframes all autobiography as highly fictionalized in order to underscore the idea that the teleological narrative of coming into a self, a feature seemingly shared by both coming-of-age stories and autobiography, is a generic imposition rather than an accurate reflection of one’s life journey. In what follows, I argue that through the use of a nonchronological structure, Woodson employs a model of coming of age that queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton terms “growing sideways.” As Stockton argues, “‘growing up’ may be a short-sighted, limited, rendering of human growth, one that oddly would imply an end to growth when full stature (or reproduction) is achieved. By contrast, ‘growing sideways’ suggests that the width of a person’s experience or ideas, their motives or their motions, may pertain at any age.”2 By using this model of adolescent development, Woodson renounces the straightforward teleological linearity of standard coming-of-age narratives, positioning August’s coming of age instead as that which can only be understood through retrospective encounters with her life. That is to say, it is the narrativization of her youth that creates links between the events of the past and August’s contemporary sense of self. The seemingly coherent subject position at the time of writing, then, is a product of this retrospective narrativization. Autobiography in Reverse While Another Brooklyn functions as the autobiography of its protagonist, August, the novel does not start at the beginning of August’s life, nor is the narrative told in chronological order. By structuring the text this way, Woodson rejects the linear, teleological narrative of self-development apparent in both the autobiography and the coming-of-age genre. Such an understanding of the narration of the human life narrative can be seen in Philippe Lejeune’s definition of autobiography. Lejeune writes that autobiography is “a retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is on his individual life, in particular the story of his personality.”3 There are clearly many problems with this definition of autobiographical writing. The use of prose excludes poetry. Lejeune refers to self in the singular, as if it is unchanging. And the exclusive use of male pronouns excludes writing by women.4 Lejeune’s definition also implies that the story of a personality is inherent in the story of a life, which is to say that one’s personality exists prior to the...

The Fear of Black Men? A Fanonian Cartography of Anti-Black Misandry as Psycho-Sexual Pathology

In contemporary discourse across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, it is common to see descriptions and narratives about Black males framed in the negative categories of hypermasculinity, hypersexuality, hegemony, patriarchy, and misogyny (Oparanozie, Sales, DiClemente, & Braxton 2012; Smiley & Fakunle, 2016; Littles, 2020; Logan, 2020 and Moore, 2021). For instance, Moore (2021) describes Black males as individuals who demonstrate toxic behavioral traits such as aggression, patriarchal thoughts and dominance, and hegemonic masculinity. Similarly, Collins (2005) describes Black men as possessing the combination of hyper-sexuality and proclivity towards committing a crime which makes them inherently violent. Similarly, hooks (2004) describe Black males as dangerous because their pursuit of social and political power has led them to completely embrace patriarchal (hegemonic or toxic) masculinity. Black men in America have historically been depicted as violent and threatening (Hackman, 2013). All these negative ascriptions contribute to the general view of Black males as dangerous and socially deviant beings that deserves to be "feared." As such, many whites in the United States have grown up fearing Black male bodies, fraternizing about their sexuality as well as framing their natural corporeal movements as menacing. This is now even more apparent with the frequency with which many white members of law enforcement, as well as white vigilantes, are not legally held accountable for the frequent blatant murder of Black men and boys in America today, especially when "fear" is offered as the justification for such cold-blooded murderous acts. Thus, the Black male body is subjected to the white gaze as something to be feared, a site of terror and threat, which often results in violent forms of aggression, discrimination, and in extreme cases, death. In this paper, I use Fanon's notion of phobogenics and the Subordinate Male Target Hypothesis (SMTH) under Social Dominance Theory, as theoretical frameworks to expose the notion of "the fear of Black men" as an irrationally fabricated rhetorical trope. Unveiling this trope as part of the psychology of oppression deployed by dominant white males to maintain power and perpetuate both racialized and gendered discrimination against Black males. This paper concludes that "the fear of Black males" in America should be understood as the upshot of a form of antiblack misandry that specifically targets Black males and overdetermines their existence.

On Ownership: An Introduction

On OwnershipAn Introduction Eula Biss (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 32] Ownership is a massive vessel, freighted with implication, swayed by legal currents, caught in the conceptual eddies that whirl around every use of the possessive—“my child,” “my house,” “my story,” “my body,” “my land, “my language.” The writers gathered here have generously offered their work on the theme of ownership, broadly interpreted. Their thinking invites us to consider ownership in all its dimensions, from its political implications to its intimate entanglements. I came to the concept of ownership through buying a house, and then writing a book that critiqued the mindset of middle-class homeownership. I wanted to resist being owned, so to speak, by ownership, as futile as that effort might be. In the final stages of writing Having and Being Had, I sent the opening pages to the film-maker Dalia Huerta Cano, who underlined disparate sentences and [End Page 33] phrases and then stitched them together into a new text, a voice-over for our short film Collector’s Item. This process was revelatory— to engage in collaboration, I gave up exclusive ownership of my work for something more dynamic. Inspired by that experience, I approached guest-editing this folio in the spirit of collaboration, in hopes of having my own thinking unsettled and upended by the work of others. The problems posed by the concept of ownership are international in scope, and the writers who contributed to this folio are from Colombia, Korea, Mexico, Sierra Leone, and South Africa, as well as Kentucky, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and that country we call California. Aminatta Forna, whose father was imprisoned and hanged for his political resistance in Sierra Leone, considers the popular use of the word trauma in an American context. Her essay “Who Owns Your Story?” explores how we might unwittingly cede our stories to concepts carried into our consciousness by the Trojan horse of language. In the essay “Unspeakable Pain,” Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas slips into and out of herself through language. Her job as an interpreter is to inhabit someone else’s words and someone else’s identity, to erase herself—but she performs this erasure with an understanding that is hers alone. In Nami Mun’s story “The Hermit,” a mother whose name has been erased, who has lost everything, including her say over her body, gives up her child, the only thing she feels is truly hers. She marks her ownership of the child with a desperate act of love and violence. An accountant who is himself owned as property makes a request for goods that include a “good woman” in Tiphanie Yanique’s poem “Invitation to a Pleasure Ride with Phillis Wheatley as Honored Guest.” The accountant is asking permission to spend not just money but his own time in the company of a celebrated eighteenth-century poet named after the slave ship that brought her from West Africa to the British colony of Massachusetts. Every historical accounting of the United States runs red with the damage done by white people who have exercised property [End Page 34] rights over Black lives. Ownership is a double-headed ax that cuts in two directions—it enriches and it robs, it gives and it takes, it builds and it kills. This ax haunts the shadows of “The Black Shape” by Aisha Sabatini Sloan. In this essay, she illuminates, with refracted light, the challenge of a Black artist meeting the white gaze, the challenge of making art that is owned not by the viewer but by the maker. How a shared culture is made, claimed, and physically inhabited is taken up by José Vadi in “Whose Streets?” Here he celebrates the defiant acts of play that define skateboarding, and reveals how a group of people accused of damaging public property may preserve and protect it. Property is fragile in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s poem “Guest House,” where the burden a person imposes on a place must be atoned for with exhaustive care. In “An Attempt at Exhausting a Neighborhood in Chatsworth, California,” David Trinidad reclaims the place he’s from in an...

Reimagining the White surveillance gaze: A practical theological proposal for repentant and solidaristic engagement

ABSTRACT This surveillance gaze is White in the sense that while it may, on occasion, intentionally target people who are non-white for special scrutiny, this gaze comprises operations and experiences of surveillance that assume Whiteness as normative and unremarkable. It raises barriers which are of no, or minimal hindrance, to white people. This article draws on examples and theories of racial bias within Artificial Intelligence technologies to identify dataism (a naïve trust in data) to be a significant dimension of the problematic gaze. Using Stoddart’s cruciform Christian theology of surveillance and the preferential optic for the (digitally) poor, in conjunction with Trozzo’s theological critique of data and Pattison’s theological notion of enfacement, proposals are made for dismantling the White surveillance gaze. These include acknowledging biases in White theology and imagining a redeemed White gaze as a paradigm of repentant and solidaristic surveillance. The article concludes with recommendations for enhanced practice by Christians who are developers, users, and subjects of surveillance technologies.

Ecce homo … ? Beholding mission’s White gaze

ABSTRACT This article uses materials from the London Missionary Society archive to frame a discussion of mission as ‘enacted White gaze’. The article outlines generations of missionary material that expose the ways Whiteness recentres its views and imposes it on the wider church and world. This exposes Mission’s complicity in creating Whiteness and blurring together White and Christian supremacy. Thus, dismantling Whiteness is incumbent on mission movements as a part of their reparation for their complicity in and profit from colonialism and racism. Using New Testament material and critical Black theology, the article highlights the profound change of perspective, heart, faith, and vantage this requires.

Performing Disidentification and Disrupting Neoliberal Multiculturalism in HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness

The HBO television series Random Acts of Flyness (2018) created, written and directed by Terence Nance along with a collective of young black filmmakers reconfigures tropes of the variety sketch comedy genre to critique dominant representations of blackness. This article examines how Nance and his team adopt novel and creative approaches to decentring the white gaze in order to hone in on the nuances and multi-faceted nature of blackness, thus challenging essentialist notions of fixed identities. I argue the show’s anti-essentialist approach can be understood through what José Muñoz (1999) conceptualizes as a performed disidentification on screen. In particular, Random Acts works on, with, and against the hegemonic representational economies and discourses of corporate media as a creative tactic of disidentifying with racist forms of misrecognition such as blackface minstrelsy as well as received ideas about heteronormative black masculinity and gender. Finally, I examine how the show employs intersectional politics and a black counter-gaze to challenge neoliberal and co-opted models of diversity within the television industry that fail to seriously engage with the subjugated knowledges and lived experiences of racialized groups.

On being a space invader and the thing around my neck

This article presents itself as an autoethnographic reflection on my positionality as a veiled, South African Muslim of Cape Malay descent and lower middle class background, attempting to navigate access to white educational space, as part of my doctoral research in Flemish primary schools. I explore what it means to be racialized as ‘other’ whilst also assuming a position of ‘authority’ as researcher, and occupying a particular space (positioned as neutral and secular) as a ‘body out of place’ (Puwar, 2004), in which a symmetry can be seen between myself and those categorised as ‘other’. The aim of this article is to reflect on how this occurs through certain processes, namely: (in)visibilisation; reprimanding; compartmentalisation; and, interpellation. I also reflect on the body of the anthropologist and the idea of the ‘objective researcher’ in order to illuminate how the mechanisms of racialization work. I engage the ensuing psychological burden brought about by the encounter with the ‘white gaze’ (Fanon, 2008). As a complement to the autoethnography, I make use of literary fiction as a method of analysis, in order to highlight the way in which literature can stimulate the formation of analytical insights (see Craith &amp; Kockel, 2014) and, I draw on film.&#x0D;

Challenges in Implementing Antiracist Pedagogy Into Counselor Education Programs: A Collective Self‐Study

This self‐study examined the challenges experienced by three Black counselor educators when implementing antiracist pedagogy into their classrooms. Two themes emerged: White gaze in counselor education and marked as an outsider within. Counselor educators should engage in continuous self‐reflexivity and positionality while integrating and valuing Black perspectives in counselor education.

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging