Abstract

Departing from Paul Gilroy’s suggestion that we need to start thinking of identity as “a noun of process,” this article considers arguments by Gilroy, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Vron Ware and Les Back to “unthink” race in the twenty-first century. With Seshadri- Crooks’s reminder that race is “a practice of visibility rather than a scientific, anthropological or cultural theory” in mind, I speculate about the role visual culture could play in giving shape to a non-racial society. I conclude by considering the work of South African artist Berni Searle which disavows the logic of racial thinking by asserting the self as a changing and fluctuating entity, thus proposing powerful ways to harness the visual’s power to help us see differently.

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