Research Guides: Facing Race Pleasure: Introduction

“Race is the preeminent pleasure of our time. Whiteness is not a color; it is a way of feeling pleasure in and about one’s body. The black body is needed to fulfill this n for race-pleasure. In our colorblind world, the white body is a form of desire and the black body is a form of pleasure”
Anthony Paul Farley, The Black Body as Fetish Object (1997)

“I think that one of the unspoken discomforts surrounding the way a discourse of race and gender, and sexual practice has disrupted the academy is precisely that mind/body split. Once we start talking in the classroom about the body and about how we live in our bodies, we’re automatically challenging the way power has orchestrated itself in that particular institutionalized space. The person who is most powerful has the privilege of denying their body…"
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994)

This selection of resources and prompts invite considerations on engaging art and other cultural productions when there are inherent power differentials and histories of oppression and exploitation between artist and subject. Barbara DeGenevieve’s “The Panhandler Project” has the potential to evoke many interpretations and perspectives.

These resources can also be useful for facilitating discussions on SAIC’s commitments to both redressing racism and other systems of institutionalized harm while also protecting academic freedom and freedom of expression. This supplementary resource is not meant to be exhaustive of all possible interpretations of this body of work or the artist-educator that produced it. Instead, these resources center on under-represented and under-studied perspectives on the legacy of racialized fetishization of the black male body; discussions of consent and agency; and the ethics of art making with vulnerable populations.

Facing Race Pleasure

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