The question of racism affects all post- and decolonial considerations of the present and unsettles them, as it assumes a notorious colour-blindness of the speakers of the global North and casts doubt on the justification of their statements. As a member of the DFG Cluster of Excellence 'Africa Multiple' and the Research Section 'Arts and Aesthetic' at the University of Bayreuth, I have therefore been increasingly concerned with the Black-White-Colour-Line thematised there and have paid particular attention to philosophical and artistic resistance to racist attributions, which I would like to take into account with the "anti" in my title.
It is interesting to note that in Africa there is a philosophical debate about the special nature of the Black or African, but the word racism is never used, apart from in South Africa. Artistic criticism of racism against Black people is known to be found above all in US-American Black art, which is why I would like to emphasise this in particular.
However, I also mention the discriminatory depictions of the German Brücke painters, who, as a visitor to the German colonies of the South Seas, surprised me in their artistic strategy of exoticisation and 'othering'. Finally, I outline changing attitudes in African film production: after a phase of critical engagement with European colonialism, which dramatised racist attitudes and aesthetically played out the black-and-white film material, a more self-reflective attitude can be observed today.
It wants to demonstrate audiovisually that Africa today sees itself confidently, no longer as the Other of European culture, but as culturally hybrid and interwoven with the whole world. This condition of cultural 'togetherness' in turn suggests replacing an understanding of undivided, individual creations with a new term that reflects the (dis)division of contemporary art productions: that of the divisive and the dividuation, as I will try to show in conclusion using the example of Ndidi Dike's artistic installation.
Global racism
In 1997, the Jamaican philosopher Charles W. Mills wrote a fundamental essay entitled Racial contract. In it, he explains that he sees world society as being divided by a race-related and inevitably racist contract that is more fundamental than the social contract in the sense of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For the racial contract, although it cannot be based on a biological argument, precedes the social contract and underlies it due to its basic, albeit unacknowledged, distinction between whites and people of other colours, between people who count and others who are not regarded as whole persons.
The racial contract makes the white discourse of self-understanding and identity possible in the first place, insofar as it distances itself, albeit mostly unacknowledged, from the historically humiliated and murdered Black bodies. As I would like to add here, however, not only Black people should be mentioned, even if Black here is meant to represent and include all underprivileged people of all skin colours and cultural affiliations, as in Achille Mbembe's Critique of Black Reason. It could probably even be argued that due to the attention that the black-white conflict has been receiving for many years, other people, such as US-American indigenous people or Asian people, are once again being pushed further into invisibility.
For Mills, it is evident in any case that marginalised races are a person-constituting factor, since whiteness is produced in the racial contract in the first place: "The white race is invented, and one becomes white by law" (p. 63). Mills calls this process an "inverted, inverted epistemology", a theory of ignorance, "an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localised and global cognitive dysfunction" (p. 18). As a contract that has never been securitised and is legally resilient, the racial contract becomes particularly powerful in moments of social and economic crisis: whatever social conflicts cannot be resolved are articulated as race-related problems. Racism is therefore always part of the political system, always virtually present, even if not always actualised.
Mills therefore devotes himself to the task of exposing this unacknowledged contract between people who count and the great mass of those who do not count as an effective, if mostly unexplicit, ideology. Even the fact that the US Supreme Court emphasises colourblindness as a legal basis shows that it is still an eminently controversial fact that no one can underestimate: "Race pervades every dimension of social life - from the conditions under which we are born to the circumstances under which we die. All of which raises the question: Why in the name of 'equal protection' would the Supreme Court adopt an approach to race that limits our ability to ensure that everyone, regardless of race, is equally protected? Asked another way, why would the Court uncritically embrace colourblindness?"
Contemporary critical race theory emerged from legal studies at Harvard University. As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanic show in their work Critical Race Theory, today it is intertwined with intersectionality debates, which attempt to emphasise that there are no clear racial identities, but rather that each person has to deal with different and often conflicting affiliations: "Everyone has potentially conflicting, overlapping identities, loyalties and allegiances. (...) The voice-of-colour-thesis holds (...) that black, Indian, Asian, and Latino/a writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are unlikely to know. Minority status (...) brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism" .
It seems obvious that colour-awareness brings deeper and more accurate insights into the constitution of society and can tear away the veil of colour-blindness to reveal unacknowledged conflicts.
Unfortunately, it must be remembered at this point that the distinction between personhood and subpersonhood also goes back to the German philosophy of the Enlightenment and idealism and its further development of English liberal philosophy. In 1775, Immanuel Kant was the first to present a philosophical theory entitled On the Different Races of Man, in which he distinguished four races, placing the white race at the top and the black race at the bottom, above a so-called olive-yellow race, which he equated with the indigenous peoples of the American continent. In his Critique of Judgement, published at the same time, he famously denies that certain people of the global South, known as the Iroquois, possess the common sense, the sensus communis, which is considered universal in principle, and are therefore incapable of making aesthetic judgements.
As late as 1821, the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel emphasised in his Fundamentals of the Philosophy of Right that the assumption of the intrinsically free human being is one-sided because it is only a direct concept, not a mediated idea in itself. The free spirit is only that which gives itself free existence through formation and (self-)appropriation (§ 57). The "absolute right of appropriation of man to all things" (§44) therefore belongs to the person, for nothing is "an end in itself - not living things; not blood, Jews - not India, Egypt". Since the will as absolute can make everything its own, it also extends to other people. Finally, Hegel defines bourgeois society as being "driven" to colonisation (§ 248) in order to procure a new need for its labour diligence.
It follows, as Mills rightly emphasises, that white "personhood" is allowed to own the non-white "subpersonhood" (Mills, 56) of the global South. This philosophy does not shoulder the political responsibility of equality and treatment of the person, but rather reinforces social and economic inequality - and catalyses racist inequality worldwide. Despite all subsequent decolonisation efforts, the global economy is still steered by the former colonial powers and their financial institutions along the racial divide.
Sylvia Wynther also emphasises in A black studies manifesto from 1994 that the prophecy of the US-American historian W.E.B. Du Bois that the problem of the 20th century would be that of the colour line is still valid and perhaps more so than ever: "this line is made fixed and invariant by the institutionally determined differentiantial between Whites and Blacks" (1996, 51). Although I would like to argue that it is not only the Black-White colour line that determines the unequal distribution of global resources and opportunities for participation, but that more than just Black people are exposed to the verdict of subpersonhood, i.e. people from the global South as a whole, who are often mixed coloured - in South Africa there is a hierarchy of skin colours, at the bottom of which are people who are Afro-Asian - it is therefore also residents of Asian and African countries who are subject to racist treatment due to the disparagement of their appearance. This is manifested not least in the unquestioned exploitation of the mineral resources of these countries and the export of climate catastrophes, which make these "others" the victims of the ecological overexploitation of the Global North.
Racism in art
In order to only briefly highlight exoticising to discriminatory representations of German art history associated with German colonialism, a few paintings by the German Brücke painters are recalled here. Emil Nolde took part in the "Medical-Demographic German New Guinea Expedition" organised by the Reich Colonial Office in Berlin in 1913-14; some of the depictions of "other" people created in this context can be described as racist, such as the New Guinea Savages of 1915 and the South Sea Warriors of 1914.
Max Pechstein's paintings are in no way inferior to these exoticising and even racist depictions; Pechstein was still depicting the inhabitants of the South Seas in a discriminatory manner in the 1950s, now in a much less expressionist style.
This German share of artistic racialisation is now well documented and is problematised by numerous museums. Today, caution with regard to representative discrimination against non-white people goes so far that the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds depicting an Indian servant has been taken down in Berlin's Gemäldegalerie, for example.
In 1939, Billie Holiday sings her best-known song Strange Fruit for the first time, which she was forbidden to sing because of its reference to lynchings, which is why she was persecuted and harassed by the FBI. In her silhouette reliefs from the 1990s, US artist Kara Walker thematises colonialism, the continued subordination of Black women alongside the ways in which they are physically raped.
From 1986, Lorna Simpson alludes to skin colour and the symbolic decapitation and depersonalisation of the black woman that goes hand in hand with it.
The South African Bernie Searl continues to exhibit her categorisation as a coloured person to this day - in a current show at the Wolfsburg Art Museum, she uses video technology to dramatise her attempt to become white like Snow White. The American painter Kerry James Marhall primarily depicts the socially subservient and at the same time indispensable status of the black woman. Chéri Samba, one of the first African artists, dramatises the racial contract as a strangulating condition of life.
More recent artistic works, for example by the American artist Alison Saar, who thematised black female identity in the 1990s, return to the theme of the strange fruit, the lynchings.
The contemporary US-American artist Sam Durant was criticised by black people when he erected his sheepfold in memory of these lynchings, as he, as a white man, was not entitled to appropriate this suffering.
However, the treatment of past and present racial discrimination is exhibited and dramatised primarily in US feature films. From the 1970s onwards, black actors took on leading roles in the detective film genre, which gave birth to hybrid social studies dealing with processes of self-understanding in the black communities. The detective film Cotton comes to Harlem (USA 1970, dir.: Ossie Davis) builds a thematic bridge to Africa and launches the blaxploitation movies. In Coffy (USA 1973) by Jack Hill, an African-American woman alias Pam Grier is empowered for the first time and uses a gun to ensure her survival, as later in the famous film sequel Jacky Brown by Quentin Tarantino. However, as the civil rights movement became more significant, these films began to be criticised for stereotyping black actresses.
Spike Lee therefore expanded the genre with Do the right thing (USA 1989) and invented new film formats such as the biopic Malcolm X (USA 1992). In his latest feature film BlacKkKlansman (USA 2018), he seeks to reaffirm the continuity of the BW colour line issue by drawing a narrative arc between Ku Klux Klan riots in the USA in the 1970s and contemporary neo-Nazi riots in Virginia and Charlottesville. On the other hand, in his chosen genre mix of detective story, drama, comedy and documentary scenes, he allows black power to triumph over white power.
From the perspectives of a black man (John David Washington) and a white undercover policeman (Adam Driver), the Black Panther and Ku Klux Klan scenes in Colorado are spied on in parallel. The spying, however, concentrates much more intensively on today's radical right-wing scene and on types of black mimicry of it, which gives rise to amusing parodies. The superiority of their race claimed by the whites is refuted on various levels, including linguistic ones. The Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke (Topher Grace), who is fictionalised in the film, appears as a real person in documentary images towards the end and incorporates the racial contract and its validity for the present, as it were.
The past is not dead, according to the thesis of Spike Lee's film, discrimination continues, at least in the south of the USA, which is why the film also quotes Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (USA 1915) and Victor Fleming's Gone With The Wind (USA 1939) and the dead of the Confederate Army of the Civil War; the Confederate flag can already be seen in the first long shot and flies through the picture towards the end to the neo-Nazi marches in Charlottesville. But Blackpower appears more self-assured than before, which is why the film genre knows a sly Black detective and moments of self-parody. Nevertheless, the film proclaims as a warning: the Civil War is not over, its battle cry echoes in Trump's short formula America first!
Under the sign of Blackness, a distinction must be made today between different film genres, those that contribute to clarifying the contemporary situation of African-American people in the USA - the series The Wire (USA 2002-2008, p.: David Simon et al.) takes on such a function - and films that take up Western genres in order to transfer them into the African or Afro-diasporic milieu and transform them into experimental and self-assured new forms as Afrofuturistic.
Symptomatically, a change in attitude with regard to the accusation of racism can also be recognised in the reference of Africa to Europe in African cinema: Since Ousmane Sembene's feature film La noire de... (1964), the first ever South Saharan film, which dramatises how a Senegalese domestic servant, subjected to racist treatment by a bourgeois family in France, takes her own life and blurs into the black and white of the film footage, the films have become increasingly self-assured and aggressive towards the coloniser: Dijbril Diop Mambéty's feature film Hyènes (1992), echoing Dürrenmatt's drama The Visit of the Old Lady, takes a capitalist white blackmailer to a Sahelian village to test the ethical consistency of the local community and its non-corruptibility; Med Hondo's brilliant feature Soleil O (1971) caricatures the Parisian bourgeoisie by making them cluck like chickens, refuting their ridiculous demonstration of superiority.
The feature film Aristotle's Plot (1996) by Jean-Pierre Bekolo should be mentioned here as symptomatic of a new African-sovereign cinema, which indulges in an 'Africa'-reflective game with genre conventions that simultaneously proclaim that Africa is no longer only to be found on the continent, but has become Afropolitan and is therefore everywhere. Made as a commission for the British Film Institute for the centenary of cinema in 1995, to which the Cameroonian filmmaker was to make an 'African' contribution, the film asks what could be African about a feature film: folkloric images with zebras and giraffes perhaps?
Set in an unspecified location, a self-ironic game unfolds between the phonetic friends Cineast and Sillyass, or two film-fanatic black protagonists who are diametrically opposed in their appreciation of films. The filmmaker's alter ego, a cineaste educated at Western film schools, rejects the US action films shown in local cinemas and demands sophisticated local cinematography. He is opposed by the fans of action movies and their superheroes Bruce Lee and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who fill the few remaining cinemas and identify with the white screen heroes.
Bekolo scrutinises this action genre and its narrative laws, i.e. Aristotelian poetics, its rules of spatio-temporal unity and tension-increasing plot development, and declares them untranslatable to African conditions. No linear development can be depicted here, only stagnation, dead ends and cyclical return. Bekolo does, however, concede that Aristotle does hit the African situation at one point: as there are more than enough massacres and misery in Africa, the production of compassion and fear that he demands can be realised particularly well here; Africa is the continent of catharsis par excellence.
As can be seen from this film at the latest, the attribution of Blackness/négritude no longer has a homogeneous addressee today. Achille Mbembe addresses this problem in his essay Critique de la raison nègre/Critique of Black Reason from 2013/14 in such a way that he recognises the human capacity for reason - and explicitly not, like the poet and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor, that of emotion - to all those who are excluded from the global symbolic and economic value chains and are "subperson" in the sense of the social contract: the majority of the population of the global South and thus the entire spectrum of skin colours and their mixtures.
Although he calls this reason 'black', he does not understand it as racially or ethnically coded, but primarily economically defined. Black functions here as a polemical marker to assign a reason of colour to all those who are traditionally denied reason and to link it with the claim to equal participation: "As soon as one utters the N-word, one brings the waste of our world back into the light (...). As the colossus of the world, the N. is the fire that illuminates the things in the cave or in the empty tomb that is our world and thus shows them as they really are (...). The term N. is a kind of mneme, a sign to remind us how it has come about that in the politics of our world death and life are defined in such close relation to each other that it has become impossible to clearly define the boundaries between the realm of life and that of death" (108).
With his polemical redefinitions, Mbembe seeks to refute the old black-white dichotomy as epistemically and ethically inadequate. Reason baptised black can be inherent to all skin colours and their mixtures; like the cosmopolitan Afropolitans, as he calls them in a variation of cosmopolitans, the integration of different cultures and their unification into an economic-aesthetic existence of cosmopolitanism should be open to all.
In the sense of recognising contemporary hybrid existence-
The philosopher Paulin Hountondji from Benin therefore also calls for the myth of Africanity to be deconstructed and for Senghor's négritude programmes and other ethnocentric approaches to be abandoned: "[I]t was necessary to begin by demythifying the concept of Africanity [...] to rid it of all its ethical, religious, philosophical, political connotations" (1981, p. 52).
Instead, I am convinced that art practices and philosophies should be promoted that are relational and "composite-cultural" in the sense of the Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant and his Poétique de la relation (1990). They are tasked with aesthetically revealing the tensions that arise from their historically different cultural origins and to bring aesthetic disharmony to the fore.
Today's anti-racist art practices
The expansion of the theme of racism at the most recent Berlin Biennale (2022) and its connection with the theme of ecology was further-reaching and ethically and epistemically challenging. Here, however, art as an unconventional and autonomous setting takes a back seat to what is often media-based art activism; under headings such as "Imperial Ecologies" and "Environmental Racism", contemporary "regimes of invisibility" and the invisible exercise of racist violence are illuminated using video technology. The initiator of Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weitzmann, claims an "Expanded Aesthetics" for these works, as questions of scaling must also be considered in the digital fixation of environmental and other crimes.
The combination of racial and ecological issues leads here to the accusation of different types of contemporary warfare, dramatised in a broader sense as the "weaponising of air, water and ice", as the destruction of landscape, air and living spaces. These are accompanied by massacres of Palestinians and other ethnic groups such as Canadian Indians, who are subjected to death by freezing to death by police officers, among other things.
Forensic Architecture brings together "cloud studies", i.e. digital presentations of biotechnological warfare that can be used against protest movements, sections of the population, regions or neighbouring regimes. Chlorine, white phosphorus, glyphosate, methane, tear gas, but also the strangulation of rivers or the remodelling of landscapes are identified as the most frequently used weapons at present. Records of carcinogenic tear gas use in urban centres in numerous cities such as Tijuana (Mexico), Hong Kong, Portland or Santiago de Chile reveal that tear gas also harms sections of the population that are not even involved in the protests.
Thanks to the molecularised perspective, the dual strategy of ecological overexploitation and racist aggression becomes apparent in many of the artistic documentaries, for example when Israeli planters allow the pesticides they spread to be carried by the wind towards the Gaza Strip. The artistic war reporting extends to analysing artificially induced earthquakes, which are said to be caused by biological "cloud bombs" and are identified as the result of French nuclear weapons tests in the Algerian desert or in the Democratic Republic of Congo, documented by Ammar Bouras in photo collages and visual images of the barrel waste left behind.
Susanna Schuppli and Imani J. Brown in turn denounce types of petrochemical land destruction by means of oil production facilities and pipeline structures in US Siouxland and the flood zones of the wetlands. Against the simultaneous destruction of the Antarctic ice habitat, Schuppli pleads for the granting of "cold rights" to the Dakota and emphasises this claim in puns such as "just-ice". Types of resistance by Black and Indigenous activists and their demands for indigenous rights and eco-repair are increasingly explicated.
Dividual-artistic processes in the sense of anti-racialisation
As a white German academic, I would like to reiterate that the dichotomisation of skin colour can no longer be the decisive problematising category of the present in view of cultural interdependencies. Works of art are increasingly confronting the complexity of cultural and ecological interdependence that is recognised today. For, as already emphasised, the BW colour line can also produce colour blindness if it disregards or ignores other skin colour differences and the evaluations that accompany them.
Continuing the concept of intersectionality, I myself have sought to summarise in the concept of dividuation (Ott 2015) that people, societies and art practices today are no longer individual, literally undivided, but multiple participants, as they are involved in the different registers of gender and race, but also of language, culture, technology, economy and ecology, thus forming intersections of voluntary and involuntary participation on different levels and having to construct their composite identity, as Glissant says, albeit with varying degrees of freedom.
The term dividuum was already used by Novalis and Nietzsche due to the realisation that we can split up our abilities and affects and devote ourselves to contradictory things at the same time, but in any case cannot be permanently understood as an undivided unit. Gilles Deleuze uses the adjective "dividual" to characterise films and musical compositions which, due to their time-based character and audiovisual divergence, cannot be reduced to a common denominator and therefore cannot be called individual.
Dividuation, the more process-orientated name, aims to emphasise the ambivalences and incoherences of the person, intentional entanglement as well as unconscious, unintentional appropriation. Contemporary science teaches us that we are not necessarily connected to others in a self-chosen but constitutive sense: On the biological level with biotic masses that nourish us, co-determine our genetic development and, from an ecological perspective, are currently multiplying as agents of planetary existence with unpredictable long-distance effects; on the sociological level with social masses of different cultures and diverse genders, which help to control our subjectivisation and our attitude to life and are important for our affective-communicative social relationship in the digital realm. At the same time, our interventions can become dangerous, as we are preemptively calculated, reduced to number codes and passwords and increasingly commodified in terms of financial technology.
Today, dividual statements can be observed in numerous art practices, for example in the work of Ndidi Dike, who prefers to perform as an artist from Africa rather than as an African artist. She employs tactics of reprendre, of re-absorption, as called for by the Congolese philosopher Valentin Mudimbe, by combining materials such as gold and vanilla and formulating a critique of the nefarious extraction policies of Western European powers. In her 2021 multimedia installation Commodities of Consumption and Sites of Extraction at the Savvy Gallery in Berlin, she exhibits transparent curtains as advertising media for vanilla, tea and other colonial products.
She contrasts them with reprints of black and white photographs showing anonymous black people, historical labour conditions and workers in vanilla factories, as well as the Queen and Westminster Abbey, to evoke the colonial setting. There are also texts on slavery and the demand for restitution of the Benin bronzes. With the cake plates placed in front of the curtains, it also refers to the formation of English taste, as analysed by the art historian Simon Gikandi from Kenya.
In conclusion, I would like to claim that her installation is an example of aesthetic-cultural division, as it refers to aesthetic practices of the West and combines them with materials from the global South in order to point to the interdependence between the economic and cultural contributions of North and South, which can no longer be ignored and which, due to their interdependence, pose major problems and push racial issues into the background.
to kick.
