Challenging ‘race’ and (re)creating identity in community arts workshops

When?

Monday 25 January 2010, 17:00 to 18:30

Where?

Room 04AD00 (AD building, ground floor) University of Surrey

Open to:

Staff, Students, Public

Speaker:

Caroline Howarth

Caroline Howarth, LSE, London

Social Psychology has long recognised the role of the visual and the gaze in the development of identity, representations of others and prejudice. The images that others have of us, our reworking of these images into self-images, and the psychological politics involved in clashes between different images of the same communities, all have a profound effect on the Social Psychology of everyday life. This is all the more significant for racialised communities and individuals. Given this, there are surprisingly few empirical studies that practically explore the actual production of self-images or the contestation of stigmatising representations of particular communities.

In this paper I examine one community-based arts project that does precisely this: it uses art (photography, painting and weaving) as media to examine the images that people hold of themselves and explore how far these correspond to and contest others' sometimes negative and racialised images of them. The arts project was designed as a space for mixed-heritage children, teenagers and parents to come together and challenge representations that 'race' and collaborate positive multicultural identities. This design adhered to a conceptualisation of identity as dynamic, contested and collaborated and also promoted an understanding of social categories such as 'race' as constructed, multiple and open to challenge. The workshops described here used visual methods to bring out tensions between representation and identity, highlight stigmatised assumptions and invite collaborative narratives of positive cultural identities.

The paper illustrates how:

a) creative photography can capture the gaze of the other and the symbolic violence of racism. as well as the possibilities for recasting the self in the eyes of others and

b) weaving together different threads and fabrics that resonate with cultural associations and social memories can produce shared images and narratives of connection and disconnection, belonging and exclusion.

In conclusion, I argue that the visual aspect of identity at once highlights the conditional politics of the gaze (we cannot often avoid being seen in very particular ways - as brown or white or mixed - and the psychological politics of resistance - there are so many ways of asserting / performing/ challenging what it is to be seen as brown or white or mixed.