Since October, my right eye has been crying constantly. Drops, compresses, flushes—nothing works. The left eye contradicts all diagnosis by staying clear. That’s where we are now with the strike against white sight. One eye in constant grief and mourning, the other focused on such possibilities that still exist in this bleak conjuncture.
One eye sees how the 2020 movement continues to make gains by removing monuments, repatriating cultural property, and claiming reparations. The other mourns the far-right surging from Argentina to the Netherlands and the US—above all the infamy of the Israeli punitive expedition in Gaza that has become the second Nakba, the displacement of two million people and 20,000 dead.
The strike against white sight is the effort to see both simultaneously.
Left Eye: Monuments, Museums and Reparations.
Some of the worst monuments are gone or going. Many more remain. The Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery was finally removed. The statue of Robert E. Lee formerly placed in Charlottesville that started all the uproar against racist monuments in the US following the Unite the Right rally in 2017 was melted down. Israel nonetheless took the time to demolish a monument to Yassir Arafat in the West Bank, showing that memory conflict is always part of war.
While the Mellon foundation and other groups have poured money into creating a DEI initiative for monuments, I want to see other forms of memory work now, especially in light of the collapse of memory culture in Germany with the consequence that, as Forensic Architecture’s Eyal Weizman puts it:
German nationalism has begun to be rehabilitated and revivified under the auspices of German support for Israeli nationalism.
All monuments are part of the state-statue-statute network that reinforces and supports white sight. All must still fall.
Museums are giving up what they have to and holding on to what they can. It’s an artwork by artwork trench warfare. Restitution of looted artworks in the US has been driven by criminal investigation, like those of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, more than by any change of heart. An investigation by art historian Erin Thompson shamed the American Museum of Natutal History into finally removing human remains from its displays.
The British Museum and the UK government are still playing hard to get with regard to the Parthenon Marbles and the Benin “plaques” but their claim to moral superiority was undermined when it turned out a curator had been selling off work on eBay.
I want the empty space in museums created by full-scale repatriation to offer indoor public space for meetings, exhibits, performances, and just places to hang out out of the weather where there are bathrooms.
The material claim within the strike against white sight has made some progress. Some British families whose wealth derived from slavery have begun to pay reparations. The city of San Francisco drafted a detailed plan, envisaging payments of up to $5 million, which have since been placed in doubt due to budget cuts.
The amounts involved paled next to Barbados PM Mia Mottley’s estimate that $4.9 trillion were owed collectively by nations that formerly organized African slavery. As the year ended, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York—no one’s idea of a radical—created a commission to look into the history of slavery in the state and consider reparations.
White-identified people must continue to support these movements as allies and accomplices, especially when it costs us money.
Right Eye: Seeing Through Tears
The grief and the mourning need no accounting. One loss is a world, many thousands gone are universes. So I cry.
Imagine a story called The Crying Jew: it’s probably by Isaac Beshevis Singer or someone of that ilk and it’s set in a ghetto, a camp, or somewhere in post-Holocaust exile. This is not that story.
Imagine a story called The Jew Whose Right Eye Would Not Stop Crying. That’s a magic realist story, more promising terrain — and yet there’s nothing magical about where we are now.
My right eye wants to tell me that there’s no clear-eyed seeing of the second Nakba as it unfolds, which is not the same as saying it cannot be documented or accounted for. That which is not white sight, what I’ve called seeing in the dark, is not crisp and clear. It is for the present a seeing through tears.
What I’ve called elsewhere the “anticolonial way of seeing” was part success, part failure. In 1951, Barbadian writer George Lamming watched “colonial” English people attacking East End Jewish radical Emanuel Litvinoff for naming T. S. Eliot as antisemitic in the Institute for Contemporary Art. He called the triangulated result the “way of seeing.” For his part, Litvinoff talked of antisemitism, the Holocaust, Israel—anything and everything but Lamming.
The possibility of an anticolonial Jewish radical way of seeing that potentially existed in 1951 no longer does. The “decolonial” solution has not worked as hoped from Algeria to South Africa and Northern Ireland. As Israel makes abundantly clear, the “state” is the problem, not the solution.
Nor is “identity” the answer any more. Here’s an Israeli novelist quoted in the NYT: “We used to be Israelis. Now we are Jewish.” Meaning: Jews are weak and have no “sovereignty.” First, the Israeli state is here patently anti-Jewish, a term that should be preferred to their corrupted “antisemitic.”
Second, this “sovereignty” is not a social contract because it excludes, at a minimum, the two million Palestinians still living in the 48. Israel’s colonial messianism is not confined to the ultra-Orthodox but is quite literally its raison d’état.
Those of us who find ourselves in some way within the transnational “institute of contemporary art” after the second Nakba cannot shirk the consequences as Litvinoff did in 1951. The Documenta mess shows that the biennial moment of transnational imagining is firmly over. It is the moment for what Gregory Sholette calls the “dark matter” of contemporary art, its overwhelming majority but obscured by the financial circus.
There remains a need to reimagine a “self” that is not one, which consents not to be a single being, which sees through two eyes, one clouded by tears, the other resisting and refusing surveillance. This work is for those who call themselves artists or activists or thinkers or just anyone whatever who refuses to be defined at the intersection of messianism and coloniality.
That the Abrahamic religions oppose icons and graven images; that colonizers burn what they call totems and sacred visualizations; that Israel deploys the most vulgar kitsch in the justification of its exterminationist project—all this speaks to the ongoing role for a visual activism that strikes against white sight and the second Nakba, in alliance with the Black radical tradition and always already committed to bodily autonomy in all its forms.
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The Week in White Sight was a durational writing project. The important thing about such projects is that they respect the rule of their performance. As such, it is now over.
For the time being, as long as the second Nakba unfolds and there is a response to be made to it, I will continue to use this mailing list to do so, rather than start over again.
In the New Year, I will make a Week in White Sight Reader and post it, as ever freely available.
With that, let us walk together and make a new road in 2024.