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In her essay ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House’ Audre Lorde writes:

“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must not merely be tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. “

Lorde’s words are equally applicable to contemporary dance at large. If the contemporary dance industry merely tolerates difference through the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion, what it fails to do is to fundamentally acknowledge difference as necessary for creativity to thrive in, through and as a process of dialectic.

What then does contemporary dance as a field of practice find threatening about the potential of interdependency between points of differences?

Is it the threat of such interdependency that maintains the anti-blackness of contemporary dance?

How will universities, organisations and conservertoires invested in dance training move from the rhetoric of tolerance that keeps such anti-blackness in place to actively investing in creative training that rests on dialectic between different realities and perspectives ?

During our conversations over the past five months, we often find ourselves returning to two interrelated problems. The first is the need to understand racism as an economic formation dependent on an unequal distribution of financial wealth and material resources. The second is the issue of widespread and often well-meaning institutional agendas that pursue racial diversity and inclusion without attempting to undo the unequal distribution of wealth on which the integrity of that institution basically depends.

The thing, I think, that is at stake when these two problems are taken together in the case of the topic of our research project, goes like this:

how to make changes to fields and institutions structured through whiteness (like contemporary dance) without engaging in surface-deep inclusion exercises that merely dress the windows of a structure still dependent on and securing its racist foundations?

A brilliant formulation of this issue, and one that deepens the window-dressing metaphor, is shared by Gargi Bhattacharyya in her book Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival (2018).

What follows is a long excerpt worth reading.

Imagine a house with many storeys—an attic and a cellar, several annexes that have no direct connections, main rooms filled with comfort and a maze of unmappable corridors leading to all sorts of barely remembered wings, snugs and the occasional route outside to a seemingly isolated out-house. There are people in each part of the house and sometimes some of them meet. But mostly their movements are shaped by the place in which they find themselves, and who they see and who they can be is delimited by the strange geography of the house. Racial capitalism is this kind of story. It is a story about imagining economic formations as demarcating the relations and walls between different groups of human beings. It is also a story about imaging who enters which rooms and how. One kind of narrative suggests that everyone will get into the living room eventually—they may take different journeys and come at different paces, but all the convoluted routes will lead to the living room in the end.

Others might suggest that the house will grow other new and different living rooms—separate from the original geography of the house but providing a similar experience of comfort and safety for the populations in those wings of the building.

Both accounts—and I would say that these have been the dominant accounts for some time—assume that occupation of the/a living room is achievable by all and is a marker of progress and enhanced material wellbeing.

This work begins from the belief that much of the world has never and will never enter that particular form of living room comfort and that this exclusion or expulsion is no accident. The integrity of the building demands that different groups remain in their separate wings and such differentiations are important for the maintenance of the building and its lovely main living room.

Gargi Bhattacharyya. Rethinking Racial Capitalism : Questions of Reproduction and Survival (New York and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), pp. 1-2.

What if the ‘building’ (with its structural integrity) to which Bhattacharyya refers were re-conceived as the field of contemporary dance? What sorts of disintegrations of our field are necessary for its institutions to move beyond diversity agendas that leave ‘its lovely main living room’, with all its exclusions and expulsions, intact?

Our research for this project has in no small part consisted of encounters with sticking points and stickiness of various kinds: methodological, conceptual, political, ethical.

One of those areas in which we keep getting helpfully stuck, as a project team and in the many rich conversations we’ve been having with our research participants, is the vexed terrain of terminology. How to define ideas such as ‘race’, ‘racism’ and ‘whiteness’ across and between terminological cultures so that necessary and difficult conversations about those ideas can begin? The concepts and social formations central to our research have been defined over and again (by activists, artists and researchers) in conflicting ways that stake out positions, declare allegiances, (re)configure power relations and that make certain kinds of thought/action (im)possible.  

The definitions we’ve been thinking through are too numerous to list within this blog post. But here’s one reflection on the problems of defining ‘race’ that has been on our minds lately. Academic and poet Chris Chen includes this Addendum on Terminology in his 2013 article ‘The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality’.

ADDENDUM: ON TERMINOLOGY

“Race” has been variously described as an illusion, a social construction, a cultural identity, a biological fiction but social fact, and an evolving complex of social meanings. Throughout this article, “race” appears in quotation marks in order to avoid attributing independent causal properties to objects defined by ascriptive processes. Simply put, “race” is the consequence and not the cause of racial ascription or racialisation processes which justify historically asymmetrical power relationships through reference to phenotypical characteristics and ancestry: “Substituted for racism, race transforms the act of a subject into an attribute of the object.”⁵

I have also enclosed “race” in quotation marks in order to suggest three overlapping dimensions of the term: as an index of varieties of material inequality, as a bundle of ideologies and processes which create a racially stratified social order, and as an evolving history of struggle against racism and racial domination — a history which has often risked reifying “race” by revaluing imposed identities, or reifying “racelessness” by affirming liberal fictions of atomistically isolated individuality. The intertwining of racial domination with the class relation holds out the hope of systematically dismantling “race” as an indicator of unequal structural relations of power. “Race” can thus be imagined as an emancipatory category not from the point of view of its affirmation, but through its abolition.

Footnote (5): Barbara J. Fields, ‘Whiteness, racism, and identity’, International Labor and Working Class History 60 (Fall 2001), 48-56.

(emphases in the original)

To read the full essay:

Chris Chen, ‘The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality: Notes Towards an Abolitionist Antiracism’, endnotes 3 (September 2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/chris-chen-the-limit-point-of-capitalist-equality

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s brilliant show Séancers (2017) summons the words of several ‘sacred texts’: the work of Black feminist thinkers, artists and activists with whom Olawale Kosoko performs a political-paranormal communion. One such text is a radio interview with theologian and social activist Ruby Sales, who speaks about whiteness in terms of spiritual crisis.

Ruby Sales, 2016:

And we’ve got a — there’s a spiritual crisis in white America. It’s a crisis of meaning. And I don’t hear — we talk a lot about black theologies, but I want a liberating white theology. I want a theology that speaks to Appalachia. I want a theology that begins to deepen people’s understanding about their capacity to live fully human lives and to touch the goodness inside of them, rather than call upon them — the part of themselves that’s not relational. Because there’s nothing wrong with being European-American; that’s not the problem. It’s how you actualize that history and how you actualize that reality. It’s almost like white people don’t believe that other white people are worthy of being redeemed.

And I don’t quite understand that. It must be more sexy to deal with black folk than it is to deal with white folk, if you’re a white person. So as a black person, I want a theology that gives hope and meaning to people who are struggling to have meaning in a world where they no longer are as essential to whiteness as they once were.

You can listen to and a read a transcript of the full interview here.

You can follow Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s work in performance and education here.

In their incisive piece of writing ‘Is Decolonizing the New Black?‘ the Sisters of Resistance, Left of Brown and Jenny Rodriguez write: “Decolonising has entered consumers’ imaginations, and with it, a new kind of consumer has emerged: one that is politically astute and critical of Whiteness, but also firmly entrenched in conservative market forces that reproduce value through competitive means.”

If as project members we are to imagine ourselves at this new consumer, endevouring to critique the predominant Whiteness of contemporary dance, we need to be really mindful of our potential to be ‘firmly entrenched in conservative market forces’. How do we ensure that we wield our critique of contemporary dance’s Whiteness without perpetuating the market forces that (re)produce the powers that drive the industry?

The piece warns us of the appropriative and cooptive pitfalls of such projects, by providing clear guidance on the ethics of what needs prioritising in our enquires:

Engaging with Whiteness with a sense of responsibility and self-accountability while acknowledging that for centuries people of colour have been denied their role in producing and shaping intellectual ideas and knowledge, even about themselves. […]

Re-narrating institutional histories so that narratives of racism and imperialism are not forgotten and are instead used in ongoing work that looks to reform universities, in ways that significantly make them anti–racist, anti-imperialist spaces. […]

Developing, applying and regularly reviewing organizing principles as a way of translating anti-racist and decolonizing ethics into applied and measurable methodologies.  […]

Working against intersectional racist structures so young people of colour can step into positions of power.  […]

Organising within their own institutions to challenge racist practices and processes, including stepping back and giving up privileges, earned or unearned, as well as not continuing to hurt, violate or reduce the participation of people of colour in institutional spaces and processes  […]

Making oneself vulnerable in the act of political struggle with White capitalist patriarchy. Decolonising ethics involve a consistent de-centering of the self as well as encountering Whiteness in structures, arrangements and relationships, where personal desire, intentions and underlying assumptions should be brought under sustained scrutiny.  […]

Embracing solidarity as a radical act of self-effacement, where the Other determines the strength and quality of a relation […]

What an enormous responsibility we have taken on! The question that remains for me key to ask constantly of ourselves is : how vulnerable are we willing to make ourselves in this act of political struggle for the field?