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Project

Play-White: Racial Passing and Decolonial Images.

This research introduces a critical approach to "racial passing" and its complicity with image production. In sociology "passing" is a person's ability to be regarded as a member of an identity group different from their own e.g. racial identity, ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation. Someone who can pass for white is socially designated as one racial construct but performatively plays out whiteness. My research proposal grows out of a personal experience of racial passing. In my late 20s I learnt that in 1984 my mother was legally reclassified as white in apartheid South Africa She passed as white, or "played-white" (in South African vernacular) all of my childhood. Through this realisation along with a reflection on my image-making practice I embark on an investigation into passing, embodiment, self-presentation, and the aesthetic thresholds of identity. Current public debates on many European country's colonial history, its material and structural legacy, show there is no better moment to problematize this by encouraging a decolonial research approach to visual culture. Through my proposed research, I would like to extend this discussion further to the question of how colonialism is embodied in its subjects and images?
Date:1 Dec 2020 →  Today
Keywords:VISUAL MEDIA RESEARCH
Disciplines:Photography
Project type:Collaboration project