Panel One - Wednesday, April 7

How are artists, and how are disciplines in the arts and humanities, responding to the hyper-visuality of racial injustices on American ground? This book project explores how visual artists including Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, Amy Sherald, Xaviera Simmons, Hank Willis Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley, and new landmarks—such as the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial to Peace and Justice and the creation of Black Lives Matter Plaza—have initiated a new set of “groundwork” tactics in the Stand Your Ground Era in the United States. Stand Your Ground laws, first established in 2005 and now in over thirty-three states, define the right to self-defense, to claim the ground on which one stands if there is a perception of “reasonable threat.” The law disproportionately affects black and brown lives today. These artworks prompt the question, What does it mean to not be able to “Stand Your Ground”? What are the representational tools available to show the frequent challenge to this upright position as a statement of sovereignty over one’s own life? How has the manifold meaning of the term “ground”—as both reason, fact, but also soil itself, opened up a mode of critical inquiry to address the injustices wrought at our feet? Just as the field of environment studies has begun to consider its nexus with racial inequity, this book approaches representations of the “ground” through the lens of racial formation in the United States, considering the “groundwork” that artists have created as both practical labor for civic society, and as a prompt for new, critical methodological inquiry in the arts and humanities at large.

It was Barbadian poet  George Lamming who coined the term ‘way of seeing’ as an anticolonial practice his 1960 Pleasures of Exile. Reading at the newly-created Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1951, Lamming was greeted with loud applause that he took to be an index that his Blackness had been seen. When East End Jewish radical Emmanuel Litvinoff attacked T.S. Eliot’s anti-Jewish racism, the uproar indicated that the colonizers had seen the poet as a Jew. At this juncture, Lamming saw how the anticolonial ‘way of seeing’ operates: ‘First, they see me but then they see you (as me)’. At a time of intense debates about realism and commitment in the arts and popular culture, Lamming’s antiracist and anticolonial ‘way of seeing’ remapped (the) colonial capital in terms of gentrification, white supremacy, decolonization and immigration. I follow this formation using the contemporary work of Stuart Hall (who intervened in Notting Hill as a school teacher); and the (white, British) photographer Roger Mayne’s pioneering studies of Notting Hill. Mayne’s photographs were intended as art, following his exhibits at MoMA and the ICA, and show formal influence from Lucian Freud. Just as Lamming saw how Litvinoff was seen, it is possible to discern the formation of a “way of seeing” in Mayne’s work that is somewhere between evidence and disclosure. Taken together, the work of Hall, Lamming and Mayne indicates how another formation of critical visual culture studies can be traced that begins with antiracism.