Picturing Whiteness: Race Representation in the National Collection of British Art 1700s to Now

Despite their ostensibly progressive positioning, contemporary art institutions in the Global North reveal ongoing racialised biases through their prioritisation of white subjects and worldviews in artworks; favouring of Western aesthetic discourse; objectification or non-inclusion of artists of colour, and adoption of covert assumptions of their viewerships' ethnic identities. This doctoral research seeks to interrogate and make visible both the overt and the philosophically implicit privileges of 'whiteness' in art works in the Tate Britain archives. The objectives of this doctoral research are to:- Reveal the philosophical and socio-cultural determinants that shape white modes of thought as apparent in the works of the Tate collections to demonstrate that whiteness is culturally-specific;- Determine how representations and thus understandings of whiteness have varied across time,
place, and artist positionality;- Demonstrate that white identities are intersectional, not monolithic, with a view to disrupting the collective normative power of whiteness;- Show that 'Britishness' is neither stable, nor ethnically or racially contingent, by interrogating the varying relationships between race, ethnicity and nationalism as represented in the Tate collection;- Employ hitherto deprioritised aesthetic philosophies as legitimate alternatives to prevailing
hegemonic postmodernist narratives of multiculturalism (Oguibe & Enwezor 1999), and othercanonised aesthetic arguments. Together, these objectives delineate white cultures in order to achieve the overall aim of providing a
methodological framework that recognizes the structural power and assumptions inherent within the whitegaze. This approach would be innovative because analysis of race representations in the context of art
institutions in the Global North tend to unintentionally perpetuate racialised structural hegemonies byexploring so-called marginalised identities from a dominant philosophical perspective (Okoye 1996). Thisresearch, conversely, would seek to reverse the gaze, decentring whiteness from its widely unchallengeduniversal subject position and 'recentring' decolonised knowledge systems (Mbembe 2015), thus
approaching a truly heterogeneous (Radhakrishnan 1987) reframing of art historical methodology, thatdoes not seek to assimilate non-European philosophies into a European framework (Mignolo 2001;Dabashi 2016). The doctoral research could provide the initial basis for an exhibition of whiteness, a response to 'Picturing Blackness...'.