Race, Privacy, and Politics/Art

Cheng’s observations of the discomfort encountered at the prospect of pairing (or comparing) theory/aesthetics with politics mapped “privacy” and “publicity” onto categorical divisions of art vs. politics in an illuminating way. Theory, she writes, “is often taken to be an indulgence,” which casts a “double bind between political exigency and private imagination at the heart of any ethnic-racial work of art,” (25). Clearly, the racialization of subjectivity and the development of agency through racial awareness are pertinent not only to legislation as the place where law is “animated,” but in terms of who can and should produce “ethnic-racial” artwork, or art in general. How has the making of art either been relegated or made inaccessible to “underrepresented” people on the basis of racialized relationships between publicity and privacy we’ve identified so far?