Time After Whiteness: Performative Pedagogy and Temporal Subjectivities in Art Education

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to theorize pedagogies that reckon with and provide an alternative to the chronicles of White time in visual art education. While Whiteness has garnered significant attention in visual art education scholarship during the past 2 decades, and particularly so in the past few years, time has not featured explicitly as a central analytic. Through engaging with how visual art education scholars work with alternative temporalities to White time in their own scholarship, I attempt to theorize a pedagogic approach that might summon subjectivities that reckon with and counter the dominant logics of White time.

Acknowledgments

I thank the three anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ This approach is consistent with the NAEA Position Statement on Use of Imagery, Cultural Appropriation and Socially Just Practices (National Art Education Association, 2019).

² I am indebted here to Nguyen (2012), who discussed the “gift of freedom” (p. 4), which was ostensibly offered by the United States to refugees from the Vietnam War. For Nguyen, this gift of freedom is always deferred, as refugees are never accepted as modern subjects who are entitled to same liberal rights as White Americans.

³ This observation resonates with long-standing debates in critical pedagogy. See, for example, Ellsworth’s (1989) own reflection on the contradictions inherent in becoming a critical pedagogue.

⁴ My thought here is shaped by Giroux’s (1997) discussion of Jacques Derrida’s “performative interpretation” (p. 7) as well as O’Donoghue’s (2019) discussion of the “pedagogic potential of artworks” (p. 1), and Isherwood’s (2020) theorization of queer aesthetic sensibilities.

⁵ Buffington (2013) defined the Lost Cause narrative: “The Lost Cause narrative holds that the enslaved people were relatively content with their situation as slaves, and that the South acted in a heroic manner fighting against northern aggression” (p. 301).

⁶ This perspectival approach is necessary but requires a nuanced approach. It is possible, for example, for a White person to use the prior erased historical figure to reflect on their privilege rather than dismantling the various epistemic and ontological investments of Whiteness in art education. This “circularity of white reflexivity,” as I have called it, risks reproducing the fungibility of, in this example, Blackness (Denmead, 2019, p. 5).