Dividing the Light

Images can be powerful – and the choices that go into their making, both revealing and obscuring. In 2019 I undertook to make a stained-glass window, based on a photo I had taken ten years prior at a missionary base in South Sudan. I use reflections on this art project to highlight the idea of memory as practice, with a focus on the slippery and sometimes problematic ethics of ethnographic representation as a positioned, porous, and ‘becoming’ subject. Through explaining the context in which the photo was taken, alongside the process of the window’s construction, I reflect critically on discomfort, desire, risk, and imagination, considering the work of the (white) gaze and my own internalised structures of colonial feeling. I evoke ghosts, haunting, and the phantasmal to consider affective connections between (personal and historical) pasts and present, as well as self and other – with acknowledgement that sometimes a past self can also become an other that we must learn to recognise, and dwell with, as part of grappling with the ‘splinters’ of anthropological practice and being.

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 & Kockel, 2014) and, I draw on film.

Black Women's Groups, Life Narratives, and the Construction of the Self in Late Twentieth-Century Britain

Black British women's centres and groups evolved out of black women's combined exclusion from male-dominated anti-racist activism and the resurgent feminist movement of the late 1960s. And yet, despite their stable presence in many of Britain's inner cities, black women's centres and groups, and the lives of the women who forged them, have evaded historical interrogation. This article explores how black women's centres provided women with the space and time to nurture their personal experiences of sexism and racism, achieve a sense of self-sufficiency, and celebrate their heritage, which placed every member on a path towards self-discovery. This centring of the black female self was not, as black male activists believed, set on undermining the Black liberation movement, but was considered as a vital tool in the overarching mission to defeat white global supremacy. Drawing on a collection of oral history interviews, this article explores how black female activists constructed a sense of self that turned away from the homogenizing white gaze of post-war Britain. Teasing out the complexities around black female activism, selfhood, and memory, this article contributes substantially to the growing body of literature on late twentieth-century black British history.

Sartre’s imaginary and the problem of whiteness

Jean-Paul Sartre’s failures in Black Orpheus have been widely and rightly explicated by a number of theorists, most notably Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. Sartre has rightly been criticized for imposing a white gaze onto his reading of colonized African poetry. It would seem that his work offers us no tools for anti-racist work today. For this article, I read his failures in the text alongside his work in The Imaginary and Being and Nothingness to argue that we can learn from his failures and that his failures do offer us conceptual tools for anti-racist work today. I argue that Sartre’s main contribution ought to be understood as a provocation to white people. He is provoking white people to confront how whiteness works in their imaginary. The imaginary is nothing but what one puts into it, and what one puts into it is imbued with the historical, social and cultural. The image is imbued with the individual’s experiences within a historical, social and cultural situation. If this is the case, then the confrontation with and critique of the image is a political act. In confronting and critiquing the image, one is confronting and critiquing the situation in which the image emerges. The hope is that in doing so, white people could transcend the facticity of their whiteness in particular situations for the better, which in turn would have positive consequences for the larger sociopolitical situation.

Catering to White Audiences

Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview attempts to implicate white audience members in spectating Black life in order to make room for audiences of color to imagine a story built outside narratives of overcoming. Yet Fairview expects and operates under the assumption that there is a white audience to respond to the work, and leaves audience members of color exposed once more to the white gaze.

Staging Intersectionality

This essay follows the making of a queer of colour aesthetic space in the form of a music video entitled Brother, within a largely homogenous white University. The video places white heteronormativity on the periphery whilst intersectional brown bodies take the centre. It inverts racist and fetishistic tropes in music video culture and reverses the white male gaze. The making of the video created a small brown island in a sea of white as a vision of a future brown space protected from the ubiquitous, ambivalently festishizing white gaze; a gaze that projects its own narrative onto bodies of colour. It puts forward a thesis of racial agency, whereby the performance of “race” is scripted by the person of colour and not provoked by the construct of whiteness.

Experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic: From the perspective of an MSW student

This reflexive essay offers an uncensored narrative and delves deep into the life of one MSW student during the Covid-19 pandemic. Five themes were uncovered through intense reflexive based practices and these included: parenting and food insecurity, silencing of the voice, grieving the practicum placement, the white gaze and a reduced empathetic capacity. Ultimately, meaning making is achieved through unsettling the concept of the self, identifying and exposing vulnerability and deflowering the power dynamics operating within Canada.

The Danger of White Innocence

This paper explores how whiteness as the transcendental norm shapes the meaning structure of Black-being-in-the-world. If home is a place, a site, a dwelling of acceptance, where one is allowed to feel safe, to relax, to let one’s guard down, then being Black in white supremacist America is anathema to being at home for Black people. Indeed, to be Black is to be a stranger, something “strange,” “scary,” “dangerous,” an “outsider.” To be Black within white America belies what it means to dwell, to reside, to rest. In other words, one’s sense of racialized Black embodiment remains on guard, unsettled, hyperalert. Phenomenologically, there is a profound sense of alienation, where one’s racialized body is ostracized and shunned. On this score, I examine, within the mundane context of an elevator, how the dynamics of intersubjectivity and sociality are strained (or even placed under erasure) through the dynamics of the white gaze. The white gaze, among other things, functions to police the meaning of the Black body and attempts to de-subjectify Black embodiment. In this way, the only real perspective is white. Black bodies are deemed devoid of a perspective on the world as there is no subjectivity, no sense of agential meaning making. One might say that Black people, on this view, constitute an essence, a typified mode of being. Unlike the existentialist thesis where existence precedes essence, Black people are locked into an objecthood, a fungible and fixed essence. This racial and racist myth is what, for Schutz, would collapse the importance that he places on intersubjectivity and sociality. Indeed, within this paper, I delineate the threatening, necro-political dimensions of whiteness that I experienced after writing the well-known article “Dear White America.” That experience cemented, for me, and for many other readers, what it means to occupy the residence of whiteness, an abode that can take one’s life in the blink of an eye. The experience of the racialized stranger means walking a tightrope, a precarious situation where one flirts with death, where one’s body is deemed hypersexual, inferior, frightening, and monstrous. Based upon this construction, the white body is deemed the site of virtue, safety, deliverer, protector of all things white and pure. Think here of “the white man’s burden” or the idea of “white manifest destiny.” Stain, blemish, taint, and defilement are indelible markers of the stranger. And based upon the logics of racial purity, one must extinguish the “vermin,” the “criminals,” the “rapists.” While I don’t explore this within the paper, Schutz scholars will immediately recognize the genocidal implications of what would have been at stake for Schutz had he not escaped Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic gaze and his Anschluss of Austria. My sense is that Schutz would have understood not just the horrors of white racism but would appreciate the necessity of theorizing the need to rethink home as existentially capacious and intersubjectively vibrant. I conclude this paper by thinking through the concept of “breakdown”, delineating its spatial, phenomenological, and subjectively embodied implications. Breakdown, as I use the term, upends forms of white racialized habituation, creating possible embodied psychic space for what I term un-suturing, which involves undoing the machinations of white safety in the face of alterity, where the stranger invokes wonder and self-critique.

(Re)imagined Possibilities

This essay and accompanying conversation examine the works of filmmaker and scholar Zeinabu irene Davis, whose work centers Black women, engaging their histories and contemporary stories, and thus representing their agency and complex personhood. Davis acknowledges Third Cinema and African/Afro diasporic influences in shaping her style of storytelling and in evolving her fierce Black aesthetic that disrupts the normativity of the dominant white gaze in mainstream media. These choices signify Davis’s ethos and priorities as a filmmaker, a documentarian, a womanist, and a community organizer who humanizes and celebrates her characters on-screen.