Growing up Brumajum: Relationally Choreographing Whiteness
Date: 22nd October 2014, 12.30 - 1.30
In this talk I do some self positioning work in relation to my own relationship to my work on whiteness as a positioning of relationally enacted power/agency which entails responsibility for and vulnerability in the face of racialising practices.
The talk is a development of one given in response to my involvement in the showing of the Black British Photographer Vanley Burke's latest exhibition 'By the Rivers of Birminham' at the University of Johannesburg this (2014) Summer ( see http://fadagallery.blogspot.co.uk/2014_07_01_archive.html). It is a personal, professional and political response to considering my relationship to Burke's work, as well as a development of my earlier (2005) work on thinking through my own enactment of racialising practices through researching and teaching about whiteness.
Conceptually, I am interested in extending my (forthcoming, 2015) work which offers the notion of 'relational choreography' as a means to understanding the interdependencies of power and vulnerability within subjectification practices and the difficulties this presents in taking personal responsibility for the reproduction of racism. Relational choreography helps us to understand the splits between personal and collective responsibility which prevent effective resistance to racism as a form of institutional domination.