Being called to ‘By the Rivers of Birminam’: the relational choreography of white looking

Abstract

In this article, I offer the idea of relational choreography as a way of understanding white positionality as responsible for, as well as resistant to, racialising practices. My argument develops through a self-reflexive analysis of my response to a photographic exhibition by Black British photographer, Vanley Burke, entitled ‘By the Rivers of Birminam’. Looking at Burke's photographs as a counter-archive that is explicitly resistant to the hegemonic practice of white looking, as this is enacted through a (post)colonial racialised visual schema which objectifies blackness as a means to produce whiteness, I consider the ways in which this archive can nevertheless ‘prick’ the white looker affectively. This pricking can prompt the sort of momentary self-objectification that allows the white self to be seen and understood through the Black gaze. It flips the script of whiteness. But the idea of relational choreography understands this flipping differently to a simple inversion of Manichean racialising power dynamics. Instead, a focus on the relationally dynamic interaction between objectification and subjectification as they are choreographed through multiple intersecting relations of power and vulnerability provides a realistic (albeit not romanticised) starting point for resisting the dehumanising objectifications that support a racialised visual schema desirous of whiteness.

Keywords:

• autobiography
• blackness
• emotion
• relationality
• responsibility
• whiteness

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shona Hunter

Shona Hunter is Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy Governance, University of Leeds; Research Associate, Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg