Abstracts
Alia Al-Saji
Waiting in Racialized Time: A phenomenology of racialization through image and film
In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon describes several experiences of racialization that take place through aesthetic media, in particular visual images and film. Most famously, he evokes the experience of having to encounter himself, every time he goes to the cinema: “I wait for myself [Je m'attends]”, he says. This experience of overdetermined waiting reveals something of the temporality of racialized experience, of the ways in which racialization structures and skews lived time. What takes place in this interval of waiting? What experiences of pastness and of futurity does it imply? And how does it relate to the lived experience of finding that one has come “too late” to the world of possibilities (a white-washed world), which Fanon insists on earlier in the same chapter?
In this paper, I develop a phenomenological account of the racialized structuring of lived time that occurs through artworks and film. Here, I draw on Fanon's work, on other philosophical accounts of racialized experience through artwork and film, and on my own experience of the racialization of Muslims and Arabs through such media. I appeal to examples from films and from artwork installations that repeat or try to avoid and subvert this reinforcement of racialization (e.g. the film También la lluvia and the permanent exposition Welten der Muslime at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, which try in different ways, for better or worse, to avoid dominant stereotypes). My interest is in how artworks, and especially film, may contribute to the experience of being racialized. I argue that this is not only a conscious confirmation of the existence of racial stereotypes, but an intensification and amplification in their affective life and embodied effects; they saturate my temporal horizons as a racialized subject, the atmosphere that I breathe, and the structures of practical and perceptual possibility that I can live. Finally, I ask whether, and how, it may be possible to interrupt this amplification of racial stereotypes by means of aesthetic work itself—opening the way not only to social critique but to different affective relationships to the images of racialized groups.
Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman
‘I’m a Sexual Racist!’
Arising from her observation that 'South Africa is a strange and morally tangled place to live in', Samantha Vice's article, 'How do I live in this strange place?', is 'an attempt to critically reflect upon what it is to be white in a country like South Africa'. According to Vice, 'South African whiteness might have unique features [...], but it should be understood against the theoretical context of whiteness in general'. '[W]hiteness', Vice warns us, 'is a problem all over the world' (2010: 331). If Vice asks 'how can white people be and live well', whereas Linda Martín Alcoff had earlier asked 'What Should White People Do?', then I am now asking how should persons racialised as white desire. However, I am not interested in just any desire; I am interested in erotic sexual desire for racialised human bodies. Hence my question: 'How do I lust in this strange place?'. Importantly, however, this question is not mine. It belongs, in my argument, to persons racialised and gendered as white men. It is my hope that my being a person racialised and gendered as a black man will afford me some white-critical distance from the phenomenology of posing such a potentially solipsistic question.
Kristie Dotson
Negative Space: Black Feminist Thought and Racialized Aestheticization
US Black feminist thought has made much of the “invisibility” of Black women. The terms of this invisibility have been articulated in many different ways. From opaque to shadow existences, Black feminist thought has attempted to come to grips with the difficult spaces occupied by many Black women in racialized landscapes. This presentation introduces a central idea in Black feminist thought, i.e. the occupation of negative space or being hidden in plain sight, which, for many, reflects how Black women’s bodies have been used and situated as literal and figurative conduits for racialized aestheticization.
A.W. Eaton
“What Makes You Beautiful”: On the Racialization of Bodily Taste
I plan to explore the role of bodily taste – by which I mean one's sense of what makes a person (oneself or another) physically attractive – in maintaining white supremacy today. My starting point is well-known: the sort of bodily taste that dominates prevailing forms of cultural expression overvalues features typically associated with white bodies yet disvalues those typically associated with non-white bodies, especially those features typically associated with Black bodies. While this is widely acknowledged and theorized, bodily taste is often construed as epiphenomenal, a mere reflection of the “true” motors of white supremacy. I’ll suggest, by contrast, that bodily taste is a constituent mechanism of white supremacy, and I’ll outline what I see as the primary ways in which this is so. I’ll then turn to the question of how, if at all, we can bend bodily taste in the direction of social justice. A major stumbling block to any such project is that bodily taste, like all forms of aesthetic valuing, has a significant sentimental dimension that does not directly heed one's considered views. This means that one can be fully doxastically committed to a well-worked-out anti-racist politics and yet find that in one's personal grooming and tastes in the bodies of others, one nevertheless – and inadvertently – adheres to a white-supremacist aesthetic.
Sherri Irvin
Icons of False Hope? The Role of Images in Thinking about Racial Justice
I assess two claims that have been made about images and their connection to racial justice, specifically in the context of racialized police violence. First, I assess the claim that a specific image, that of a hug shared by a 12-year-old African-American boy and a white police officer, is an “icon of hope.” I consider what it means to say of an image that it is an icon of hope, and I conclude, somewhat paradoxically, that if this image is such an icon, that is reason for us to be less hopeful that we are on the path to justice rather than more.
Second, I assess the claim that moving images documenting police violence are a source of hope that unjustified police violence may finally be effectively addressed, thereby securing justice. I offer reasons to be skeptical about such hope, and I ground this skepticism in an aesthetic analysis of how these images function for and are used by viewers.
Katharine Jenkins and Jennifer Saul
The Pragmatics of Inclusivity: Visual and Linguistic Cues to Group Membership
Many philosophers are, quite appropriately, engaging in efforts to make their syllabi less overwhelmingly white, male, cis-gendered, middle class, heterosexual, non- disabled, etc. However, some of the goals of these efforts cannot be achieved unless the social groups to which authors belong are communicated to students. This paper explores the political implications of various different ways of communicating such social group membership. We argue that despite the positive aims behind communicating group membership, attempts at such communication are liable to carry deeply problematic implications. The possibility of using visual cues rather than linguistic cues as a way to avoid these problematic implications is considered, but it does not succeed in all cases. Finally, we argue that this difficulty is not restricted to syllabi, but also affects broader efforts at integration, and communication about such efforts.
Ron Mallon
Humor, Automaticity, and Automata
Race is aesthetically powerful, but this power is often associated with problematic forms of racial essentialism.
My talk explores this familiar idea by exploring racial and ethnic humor. The talk begins by setting out a psychological model on which humor is an epistemic emotion. I then use that model to explore and illuminate some racial and ethnic humor.
Specifically, I consider the possibility of finding something humorous that one also finds offensive, and I compare such responses with the dissociation between implicit and explicit prejudice. I also consider what racial/ethnic humor can teach us about possibilities for undermining pernicious racial and ethnic attitudes, and about the character of our current attitudes.
James Damien McGuiggan
Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B: A Case Study in Ethics and Art
Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B is a strange and challenging artwork, which comprises a number of tableaux vivants (or installations) of black actors playing black people who were subject to colonial racism and to the European hostility to immigration which is presented as the heir to colonial-era racism. The work asks the spectators to inquire into their own attitudes to race and immigration, and into how they themselves inherit colonial-era racist attitudes.
I argue that Exhibit B is unique in forcing us to look seriously at the thought that the way art can affect us, even when this is essential to a good artistic aim, can be bad, and the artwork that so affects us thus defective. Exhibit B deliberately induces in its spectators a racist manner of regarding its actors, which is to say that it demands racism of the spectator. Being racist is bad, and it seems that a work that incites racism will thus be somewhat aesthetically poor. However, in Exhibit B, this incitement is a means to the good end of acknowledging and overcoming one’s racism. It seems that the spectator’s racism, and Exhibit B’s incitement of it, is thereby made permissible. I argue, however, that this does not explain the guilt the spectators feel because of their racism toward the actors. This guilt points to an incommensurability between, on the one hand, the general moral good of understanding and overcoming one’s racism, and, on the other, the particular bad of being racist toward a particular person. Our aesthetic judgement of Exhibit B seems to mirror this incommensurability.
Charles W. Mills
White Lies/Black Humor
Oppressed groups resist their subordination in multiple ways, one being through the use of humor. In this paper, I will examine, from a philosophical point of view, some of the means by which African American humor provided coping strategies for dealing with white supremacy and its associated belief-systems.
Nils-Hennes Stear and Robin Zheng
Imagining in Oppressive Contexts, or, What’s Wrong With Blacking Up?
What is wrong with the practice of “blacking up” (“blackface”) or other comparable acts of imagining or fiction-making (AIFMs)? Setting aside extrinsic flaws such as bad causal effects, aestheticians have been concerned with whether such AIFMs can exhibit intrinsic ethical flaws. Many (e.g. A.W. Eaton, Berys Gaut, Noël Carroll, James Harold) have pointed to the pernicious attitudes such AIFMs invite participants to adopt. Recently, this view has been challenged; Brandon Cooke argues that only those AIFMs which invite participants to export these pernicious attitudes to the actual world—by making the fictional attitudes actual—exhibit any intrinsic ethical flaw.
In this paper, we carve a space between Eaton et al. and Cooke. We do not believe that any AIFM is morally objectionable merely on the basis of the attitudes it invites participants to adopt, no matter how pernicious those attitudes might be. However, we argue that certain AIFMs—even when they do not cause harm, and even if they do not prescribe “export” of the pernicious attitudes in question—still exhibit a lingering ethical flaw. We draw an analogy with J.L. Austin's speech act theory to characterize this flaw as located not in the mere content of the imagining (the locution), or its causal upshot (the perlocution), but in the act that is constituted by the imagining itself (the illocution). Crucially, our claim is that the moral contours of the act are conditioned by the socio-political context in which the act is performed; while “blacking up” and similar AIFMs per se might be ethically neutral acts in genuine post-racial or non-racialized societies, they are ethically flawed in contexts of racial oppression. In particular, we argue that such AIFMs themselves constitute an instance of oppression because they express what Patricia Hill Collins calls “controlling images,” whose very existence serves to justify racist, sexist and other oppressive ideologies.
Paul C. Taylor
An Aesthetics of Resistance: Deweyan Experimentalism and Epistemic Injustice
In The Epistemology of Resistance, José Medina argues that it is impossible to understand or ameliorate the problems of epistemic injustice while also approaching them as one-dimensional affairs. Medina argues that these problems are not simply epistemic, any more than they are simply ethical or political: they are all of these at once, and must be approached from that perspective. I will push this plea for theoretical breadth one step further and suggest, by appeal to the kinds of considerations that Dewey enshrined in his experimentalist phenomenology, that these problems are also importantly aesthetic, and that the resources of aesthetic criticism and practice are vital to their amelioration.
Waiting in Racialized Time: A phenomenology of racialization through image and film
In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon describes several experiences of racialization that take place through aesthetic media, in particular visual images and film. Most famously, he evokes the experience of having to encounter himself, every time he goes to the cinema: “I wait for myself [Je m'attends]”, he says. This experience of overdetermined waiting reveals something of the temporality of racialized experience, of the ways in which racialization structures and skews lived time. What takes place in this interval of waiting? What experiences of pastness and of futurity does it imply? And how does it relate to the lived experience of finding that one has come “too late” to the world of possibilities (a white-washed world), which Fanon insists on earlier in the same chapter?
In this paper, I develop a phenomenological account of the racialized structuring of lived time that occurs through artworks and film. Here, I draw on Fanon's work, on other philosophical accounts of racialized experience through artwork and film, and on my own experience of the racialization of Muslims and Arabs through such media. I appeal to examples from films and from artwork installations that repeat or try to avoid and subvert this reinforcement of racialization (e.g. the film También la lluvia and the permanent exposition Welten der Muslime at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, which try in different ways, for better or worse, to avoid dominant stereotypes). My interest is in how artworks, and especially film, may contribute to the experience of being racialized. I argue that this is not only a conscious confirmation of the existence of racial stereotypes, but an intensification and amplification in their affective life and embodied effects; they saturate my temporal horizons as a racialized subject, the atmosphere that I breathe, and the structures of practical and perceptual possibility that I can live. Finally, I ask whether, and how, it may be possible to interrupt this amplification of racial stereotypes by means of aesthetic work itself—opening the way not only to social critique but to different affective relationships to the images of racialized groups.
Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman
‘I’m a Sexual Racist!’
Arising from her observation that 'South Africa is a strange and morally tangled place to live in', Samantha Vice's article, 'How do I live in this strange place?', is 'an attempt to critically reflect upon what it is to be white in a country like South Africa'. According to Vice, 'South African whiteness might have unique features [...], but it should be understood against the theoretical context of whiteness in general'. '[W]hiteness', Vice warns us, 'is a problem all over the world' (2010: 331). If Vice asks 'how can white people be and live well', whereas Linda Martín Alcoff had earlier asked 'What Should White People Do?', then I am now asking how should persons racialised as white desire. However, I am not interested in just any desire; I am interested in erotic sexual desire for racialised human bodies. Hence my question: 'How do I lust in this strange place?'. Importantly, however, this question is not mine. It belongs, in my argument, to persons racialised and gendered as white men. It is my hope that my being a person racialised and gendered as a black man will afford me some white-critical distance from the phenomenology of posing such a potentially solipsistic question.
Kristie Dotson
Negative Space: Black Feminist Thought and Racialized Aestheticization
US Black feminist thought has made much of the “invisibility” of Black women. The terms of this invisibility have been articulated in many different ways. From opaque to shadow existences, Black feminist thought has attempted to come to grips with the difficult spaces occupied by many Black women in racialized landscapes. This presentation introduces a central idea in Black feminist thought, i.e. the occupation of negative space or being hidden in plain sight, which, for many, reflects how Black women’s bodies have been used and situated as literal and figurative conduits for racialized aestheticization.
A.W. Eaton
“What Makes You Beautiful”: On the Racialization of Bodily Taste
I plan to explore the role of bodily taste – by which I mean one's sense of what makes a person (oneself or another) physically attractive – in maintaining white supremacy today. My starting point is well-known: the sort of bodily taste that dominates prevailing forms of cultural expression overvalues features typically associated with white bodies yet disvalues those typically associated with non-white bodies, especially those features typically associated with Black bodies. While this is widely acknowledged and theorized, bodily taste is often construed as epiphenomenal, a mere reflection of the “true” motors of white supremacy. I’ll suggest, by contrast, that bodily taste is a constituent mechanism of white supremacy, and I’ll outline what I see as the primary ways in which this is so. I’ll then turn to the question of how, if at all, we can bend bodily taste in the direction of social justice. A major stumbling block to any such project is that bodily taste, like all forms of aesthetic valuing, has a significant sentimental dimension that does not directly heed one's considered views. This means that one can be fully doxastically committed to a well-worked-out anti-racist politics and yet find that in one's personal grooming and tastes in the bodies of others, one nevertheless – and inadvertently – adheres to a white-supremacist aesthetic.
Sherri Irvin
Icons of False Hope? The Role of Images in Thinking about Racial Justice
I assess two claims that have been made about images and their connection to racial justice, specifically in the context of racialized police violence. First, I assess the claim that a specific image, that of a hug shared by a 12-year-old African-American boy and a white police officer, is an “icon of hope.” I consider what it means to say of an image that it is an icon of hope, and I conclude, somewhat paradoxically, that if this image is such an icon, that is reason for us to be less hopeful that we are on the path to justice rather than more.
Second, I assess the claim that moving images documenting police violence are a source of hope that unjustified police violence may finally be effectively addressed, thereby securing justice. I offer reasons to be skeptical about such hope, and I ground this skepticism in an aesthetic analysis of how these images function for and are used by viewers.
Katharine Jenkins and Jennifer Saul
The Pragmatics of Inclusivity: Visual and Linguistic Cues to Group Membership
Many philosophers are, quite appropriately, engaging in efforts to make their syllabi less overwhelmingly white, male, cis-gendered, middle class, heterosexual, non- disabled, etc. However, some of the goals of these efforts cannot be achieved unless the social groups to which authors belong are communicated to students. This paper explores the political implications of various different ways of communicating such social group membership. We argue that despite the positive aims behind communicating group membership, attempts at such communication are liable to carry deeply problematic implications. The possibility of using visual cues rather than linguistic cues as a way to avoid these problematic implications is considered, but it does not succeed in all cases. Finally, we argue that this difficulty is not restricted to syllabi, but also affects broader efforts at integration, and communication about such efforts.
Ron Mallon
Humor, Automaticity, and Automata
Race is aesthetically powerful, but this power is often associated with problematic forms of racial essentialism.
My talk explores this familiar idea by exploring racial and ethnic humor. The talk begins by setting out a psychological model on which humor is an epistemic emotion. I then use that model to explore and illuminate some racial and ethnic humor.
Specifically, I consider the possibility of finding something humorous that one also finds offensive, and I compare such responses with the dissociation between implicit and explicit prejudice. I also consider what racial/ethnic humor can teach us about possibilities for undermining pernicious racial and ethnic attitudes, and about the character of our current attitudes.
James Damien McGuiggan
Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B: A Case Study in Ethics and Art
Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B is a strange and challenging artwork, which comprises a number of tableaux vivants (or installations) of black actors playing black people who were subject to colonial racism and to the European hostility to immigration which is presented as the heir to colonial-era racism. The work asks the spectators to inquire into their own attitudes to race and immigration, and into how they themselves inherit colonial-era racist attitudes.
I argue that Exhibit B is unique in forcing us to look seriously at the thought that the way art can affect us, even when this is essential to a good artistic aim, can be bad, and the artwork that so affects us thus defective. Exhibit B deliberately induces in its spectators a racist manner of regarding its actors, which is to say that it demands racism of the spectator. Being racist is bad, and it seems that a work that incites racism will thus be somewhat aesthetically poor. However, in Exhibit B, this incitement is a means to the good end of acknowledging and overcoming one’s racism. It seems that the spectator’s racism, and Exhibit B’s incitement of it, is thereby made permissible. I argue, however, that this does not explain the guilt the spectators feel because of their racism toward the actors. This guilt points to an incommensurability between, on the one hand, the general moral good of understanding and overcoming one’s racism, and, on the other, the particular bad of being racist toward a particular person. Our aesthetic judgement of Exhibit B seems to mirror this incommensurability.
Charles W. Mills
White Lies/Black Humor
Oppressed groups resist their subordination in multiple ways, one being through the use of humor. In this paper, I will examine, from a philosophical point of view, some of the means by which African American humor provided coping strategies for dealing with white supremacy and its associated belief-systems.
Nils-Hennes Stear and Robin Zheng
Imagining in Oppressive Contexts, or, What’s Wrong With Blacking Up?
What is wrong with the practice of “blacking up” (“blackface”) or other comparable acts of imagining or fiction-making (AIFMs)? Setting aside extrinsic flaws such as bad causal effects, aestheticians have been concerned with whether such AIFMs can exhibit intrinsic ethical flaws. Many (e.g. A.W. Eaton, Berys Gaut, Noël Carroll, James Harold) have pointed to the pernicious attitudes such AIFMs invite participants to adopt. Recently, this view has been challenged; Brandon Cooke argues that only those AIFMs which invite participants to export these pernicious attitudes to the actual world—by making the fictional attitudes actual—exhibit any intrinsic ethical flaw.
In this paper, we carve a space between Eaton et al. and Cooke. We do not believe that any AIFM is morally objectionable merely on the basis of the attitudes it invites participants to adopt, no matter how pernicious those attitudes might be. However, we argue that certain AIFMs—even when they do not cause harm, and even if they do not prescribe “export” of the pernicious attitudes in question—still exhibit a lingering ethical flaw. We draw an analogy with J.L. Austin's speech act theory to characterize this flaw as located not in the mere content of the imagining (the locution), or its causal upshot (the perlocution), but in the act that is constituted by the imagining itself (the illocution). Crucially, our claim is that the moral contours of the act are conditioned by the socio-political context in which the act is performed; while “blacking up” and similar AIFMs per se might be ethically neutral acts in genuine post-racial or non-racialized societies, they are ethically flawed in contexts of racial oppression. In particular, we argue that such AIFMs themselves constitute an instance of oppression because they express what Patricia Hill Collins calls “controlling images,” whose very existence serves to justify racist, sexist and other oppressive ideologies.
Paul C. Taylor
An Aesthetics of Resistance: Deweyan Experimentalism and Epistemic Injustice
In The Epistemology of Resistance, José Medina argues that it is impossible to understand or ameliorate the problems of epistemic injustice while also approaching them as one-dimensional affairs. Medina argues that these problems are not simply epistemic, any more than they are simply ethical or political: they are all of these at once, and must be approached from that perspective. I will push this plea for theoretical breadth one step further and suggest, by appeal to the kinds of considerations that Dewey enshrined in his experimentalist phenomenology, that these problems are also importantly aesthetic, and that the resources of aesthetic criticism and practice are vital to their amelioration.