6. The limits of inclusion

“Imagine a house with many storeys—an attic and a cellar, several annexes that have no direct connections, main rooms filled with comfort and a maze of unmappable corridors leading to all sorts of barely remembered wings, snugs and the occasional route outside to a seemingly isolated out-house. There are people in each part of the house and sometimes some of them meet. But mostly their movements are shaped by the place in which they find themselves, and who they see and who they can be is delimited by the strange geography of the house. Racial capitalism is this kind of story. It is a story about imagining economic formations as demarcating the relations and walls between different groups of human beings. It is also a story about imaging who enters which rooms and how. One kind of narrative suggests that everyone will get into the living room eventually—they may take different journeys and come at different paces, but all the convoluted routes will lead to the living room in the end.

Others might suggest that the house will grow other new and different living rooms—separate from the original geography of the house but providing a similar experience of comfort and safety for the populations in those wings of the building.

Both accounts—and I would say that these have been the dominant accounts for some time—assume that occupation of the/a living room is achievable by all and is a marker of progress and enhanced material wellbeing.

This work begins from the belief that much of the world has never and will never enter that particular form of living room comfort and that this exclusion or expulsion is no accident. The integrity of the building demands that different groups remain in their separate wings and such differentiations are important for the maintenance of the building and its lovely main living room.”

- Gargi Bhattacharyya (2018) Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival. New York and London: Rowman and Littlefield. As quoted in Contemporary Dance and Whiteness project blog: http://danceandwhiteness.coventry.ac.uk/blog/integrity-and-disintegrations/