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?
