White Sight by Nicholas Mirzoeff;

Author:Nicholas Mirzoeff; [Mirzoeff, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: white; white supremacy; racism; decolonize; colonialism; race; race formation; Black Lives Matter; Whiteness; white sight; feminism; Black; BIPOC; DEI; human strike; statues; monuments; decolonizing; culture; activism; settler colonialism, British empire; imperialism; Sarah Elizabeth Lewis
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2023-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

6

The Cultural Unconscious and the Dispossessed

George Lamming’s way of seeing between groups placed at the margins of white seeing in the age of mass media had a general application in the decolonial contemporary. It went by way of the Caribbean, to Algeria during its decolonial revolution (1954–1962), the Black Panthers in the United States, and the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies under Stuart Hall’s direction.1 Such transnational networks of seeing should not be surprising. They were, after all, constitutive of modern art, to say nothing of imperialism. Global media made such networks material and instant, connecting the world’s population in unprecedented ways. Old ideas were splintering under the new social conditions produced by the end of empire with uneven effects. Even as empire receded, ideas of racializing hierarchy surged. Tracing this line of thought makes visible the unexpected resurgence of whiteness in Euro-American politics since 1979.

With the formal decolonization of most of Europe’s empires by 1975, for people identifying as white who had once called themselves working class first and foremost, it was being white that now mattered. Building on his insights from Frantz Fanon, Hall saw how the “great moving right show,” which he called Thatcherism, drew its energy from this fragmentation of what had once been known as “the class.”2 For all of his pessimism of the intellect, even Hall could not then have foreseen how far right this move would go and how long. In the final section of the book, I’ll consider how it has created the general crisis of whiteness. First, we need to think about how it got started.

Let’s begin with Lamming’s meeting with decolonial thinker Fanon in 1956 at the International Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris, where Fanon also used the expression “way of seeing.” Like Lamming’s moment of clarity in the ICA, the intersection of Blacks and Jews was central to Fanon’s understanding of visual encounter under colonial domination: “Anti-Jewish prejudice is no different from anti-Negro prejudice. A society has race prejudice or it has not.”3 Fanon grew up on Martinique, alongside an old Jewish community and soon found another in Algiers, where he worked as a psychiatrist. Following French-Jewish psychologist Henri Baruk, Fanon examined the cultural history of the scapegoat to analyze antisemitism. He understood both racism and antisemitism as forms of scapegoating. How could they be challenged? Rejecting Baruk’s vague concept of the “moral conscience,” Fanon framed seeing as a collective cultural process, drawing on shared knowledges. He came to realize that mass media culture was now the collective unconscious of racialization.

Who could change such global collective thinking? Fanon’s radical answer was that it would be the global dispossessed, whom he saw as the most revolutionary sector of society. Here he overturned the Marxist applecart again because it was held to be only the industrial working class or proletariat that would create any revolution. In Algiers, there were hardly any such proletarians. Instead, the city’s shantytowns were filled with marginal and dispossessed people, known to Marxists as the lumpenproletariat.

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