Exiting whiteness: unthinking race, imagining different paradigms

Abstract

Departing from Paul Gilroy’s suggestion that we need to start thinking of identity as “a noun of process,” this article considers arguments by Gilroy, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Vron Ware and Les Back to “unthink” race in the twenty-first century. With Seshadri- Crooks’s reminder that race is “a practice of visibility rather than a scientific, anthropological or cultural theory” in mind, I speculate about the role visual culturecould play in giving shape to a non-racial society. I conclude by considering the work of South African artist Berni Searle which disavows the logic of racial thinking by asserting the self as a changing and fluctuating entity, thus proposing powerful ways to harness the visual’s power to help us see differently.