On Positionality In My Recent Artwork

A certain common sense in present-day Global North arts scenes takes the position that artists in privileged positions should not make art about the structural dimensions of that positioning: able-bodied artists should not make art about the production of (dis)ability, white artists should not make art about racialization, and so on. While I do not wholly disagree with this stance, I worry about the broader effects of enshrining it as dogma. That is, I strongly agree that positionality matters, particularly for artists in privileged positions, but I object to specific ways in which this directive approaches issues of positionality. For example, this injunction assumes that there is a straightforward possibility of artists in privileged positions making work that is politically innocent or neutral. Yet the institutions of the Western public sphere are hardly politically neutral; for instance, a reading list I recently published demonstrates how many if not most of the concert hall’s protocols and infrastructures are actively implicated in racializing work (Tucker 2024). Therefore, even when, say, white concert music composers make and circulate work that does not explicitly take racialization as subject matter, they are still implicated in (re)producing racializing frameworks. From this standpoint, the directive that “white artists shouldn’t make art about race” actually obfuscates and disavows their/our always-already racializing institutional position, while also closing off possibilities for challenging this positioning.

Thus, more nuanced approaches to positionality are needed if it is going to be meaningfully possible for artists read as white to disrupt the myriad and complex ways in which their/our artistic production reiterates racializing relations. The operative question, then, might be not whether artists racialized as white “should” make work about racialization but how they might engage in position- and power-sensitive ways in dismantling racializing mechanisms intrinsic to the public sphere (Wilderson 2010), the aesthetic (Lloyd 2018), and the necro-biopolitics of sensation (Schuller 2018). Yet this latter question has barely been addressed; exceptions include Stó:lō artist and writer Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (2020) and artist-curator Ryan Wong’s “A Syllabus for Making Work About Race as a White Person in America” (2017). 

In what follows, I respond to this latter question by outlining provisional strategies I have developed for making, as a settler read as white, artwork that explicitly takes up matters of racialization and colonization. As there is a long history of white settler artists and writers producing anti-racist work that unwittingly makes things worse (for a nineteenth century example, see Hartman [1997] 2022, 17-23), white settler artists who explicitly address colonization and racialization would be well advised to proceed in an extremely deliberate and delimited way. I respond to this fraught history by adhering to the following protocols when making artwork around racialization and colonization.

• First, following Wong’s suggestion (2017) that it might be strategic for artists read as white to focus on critical interrogations of their own positioning, I limit my projects’ scope to critical mappings of white/settler/colonizer positionality. Informed by methodological interventions of Black and Indigenous studies, this protocol minimizes possibilities for re-enacting racializing and colonizing hierarchies, such as through ventriloquism and surveillance of Black and Indigenous people (Byrd 2011; Hartman [1997] 2022; Cervenak 2014), “pornotropic” displays of violence (Spillers 1987; Hartman [1997] 2022), and representations of Indigenous, Black, and racially-marginalized people as damaged (Tuck 2009; McKittrick 2011). This move also lowers risks of “taking up space,” as it leaves numerous lines of investigation regarding colonization and racialization available only to Indigenous, Black, and racially-marginalized people. 
• Second, in order to foreground the writing of Black, Indigenous, and racially-marginalized scholars and destabilize colonialist and white epistemologies, I engage with settler/colonizer and white positionality primarily by working with and through studies of these positions from below, principally those of the fields of Indigenous and Black studies (academic, artistic, and otherwise). That is, in working in this fashion, I position myself not as leading anti-racist and anti-colonial inquiries, but rather as bringing analytics of Black and Indigenous scholars to bear on historically white/settler/colonizer spaces where they have been systemically silenced. Aiming to avoid appropriative and extractive dynamics (King 2019b), I engage Indigenous and Black studies not as discrete insights but as radical interventions at the level of method (Spatz 2019), in ways that are outlined in depth in statements about each piece I make.
• It is worth noting that, while I adopt both of these approaches concurrently, much art and scholarship by settlers read as white adopts one or the other, to its detriment. On one hand, much scholarship in whiteness and settler colonial studies, as well as related artistic practices, limits its focus to white and settler positionality, but also disregards important methodological interventions on this topic in Black, Indigenous, and ethnic studies, with the effect of closing off possibilities for the critique and dismantling of whiteness and settler colonialism (on settler colonial studies, see King 2019b). On the other hand, much writing by scholars read as white in Black studies often (however unwittingly) enacts a pornotropic display of the bodies and texts of people read as Black, for instance through methods such as close reading (King 2019a).

Following the suggestion of Robinson (2019), this approach learns from vernacular protocols of the #settlercollector hashtag, in which online anti-Indigenous discourse is redirected to settlers, who are “collected” to reckon with the problem. In bringing analytics of Indigenous and Black studies to bear upon the concert hall and other historically white/settler/colonizer spaces, I aim to codify replicable protocols for “collecting” white settlers to take responsibility (everyone is welcome to join, of course) for dismantling institutional racism and coloniality. Faced with Indigenous studies texts such as Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw Nation), The Transit of Empire (2011) and Black studies texts such as Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) that challenge frameworks foundational to Western modernity, I respond by approaching these texts not only as impactful theoretical analyses but also as directives for action across and against historically Western fields of knowledge and institutions. Read in this way, these writings imply action on an immense scale, action which by definition must engage with acutely colonialist and racist spaces. In the context of this project, the rigid stance that “white artists should not make art about race” has the effect of offloading difficult work onto Indigenous, Black, and racially-marginalized people. In contrast, the protocols proposed here offer power- and position-sensitive ways for settlers and people read as white to deploy their positions strategically in taking on some of the burdens of what is, altogether, a colossal task.

Bibliography

Byrd, Jodi (Chickasaw). The transit of empire: Indigenous critiques of colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Cervenak, Sarah Jane. Wandering: Philosophical performances of racial and sexual freedom. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Da Silva, Denise Ferreira. Toward a global idea of race. U of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. New York: Norton, [1997] 2022.

King, Tiffany Lethabo. “Off littorality (shoal 1.0): Black study off the shores of ‘the Black body’.” Propter Nos 3, no. 1 (2019): 40-50.

King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black shoals: Offshore formations of Black and Native studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Lloyd, David. Under representation: The racial regime of aesthetics. Fordham Univ Press, 2018.

McKittrick, Katherine. “On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place.” Social & Cultural Geography 12, no. 8 (2011): 947-963.

Robinson, Dylan (Stó:lō/Skwah). Hungry listening: Resonant theory for indigenous sound studies. U of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Robinson, Dylan (Stó:lō/Skwah). “To All Who Should Be Concerned.” Intersections 39/1 (2019): 137-144.

Schuller, Kyla. The biopolitics of feeling: Race, sex, and science in the nineteenth century. Duke University Press, 2018.

Spatz, Ben. “Thresholds.” In Blue sky body: Thresholds for embodied research. London: Routledge, 2019: 1-56.

Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book.” diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65-81.

Tuck, Eve (Unangax̂). “Suspending damage: A letter to communities.” Harvard educational review 79, no. 3 (2009): 409-428.

Tucker, Colin. “Concert Music Protocols and/as Racialization: a Reading List,” Null Point, 2024, https://nullpointseries.wordpress.com/words/concert-music-protocols-and-as-racialization-a-reading-list/.

Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, white & black: Cinema and the structure of US antagonisms. Duke University Press, 2010.

Wong, Ryan. “A Syllabus for Making Work About Race as a White Person in America,” Hyperallergic, 2017, https://hyperallergic.com/369762/a-syllabus-for-making-work-about-race-as-a-white-artist-in-america/.