I am grateful that the Leverhulme Trust has awarded me a Research Fellowship, which will provide leave for the 2021-22 academical year. The fellowship will give me the space to advance my thinking, writing, and art-making on a speculative book project, titled White Divestment.
Employing negative utopian thought, White Divestment wrestles ultimately with the question of whether the white racial imaginary is capable of imagining futures in which whiteness has no value and what pedagogies are necessary to summon those futures.
The project stems from collective frustrations with the ways in which white anti-racist pedagogies have the paradoxical effect of shoring up and re-centring whiteness, a topic that I considered at length in my first book, The Creative Underclass.
Methodological pluralism will guide this project. I am analysing art, film, and contemporary events. I am drawing upon historical resources. And I am making artwork to be discussed in the book.
For a full description of the project, click here.
