Abstract
Art education needs to draw upon critical whiteness studies to further its social justice agenda while at the same time recognizing the resources that art education brings to questions of whiteness. In particular, whiteness should be conceptualized as a pre-conscious style. This style is composed of lines (that maximally extend white bodies in space) and angles of vision (that create hierarchically rigidified systems of difference). Certain forms of aesthetic experience can interrupt and suspend this geometry of lines and angles. The chapter concludes with a description of how the work of Kara Walker forces the white, male body of the author to stumble over itself and to perceptually hesitate, thus opening up the possibility for another way of living whiteness that troubles discrimination and privilege.
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Notes
- 1.
All racial terminology is not capitalized throughout this chapter as whiteness refers to structures of privilege and discrimination (both in relation to institutions and in relation to bodies) rather than a particular culture or particular ethnic group racially identified as white.
- 2.
The body schema for Merleau-Ponty is the most basic form of situated spatiality that enables the body to project into space without mental oversight. The body schema, in short, enables an individual to have meaningful, holistic, unified, and integrated experiences of a meaningful world.
- 3.
Granted that throughout art history, most of the Western canon has had the opposite effect, merely functioning to extend lines of whiteness and rigidify the angle of its gaze.
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Lewis, T.E. (2018). Art Education and Whiteness as Style. In: Kraehe, A., Gaztambide-Fernández, R., Carpenter II, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65256-6_17
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