This paper asks how perception becomes racializing and seeks the means for its critical interruption. My aim is not only to understand the recalcitrant and limitative temporal structure of racializing habits of seeing, but also to uncover the possibilities within perception for a critical awareness and destabilization of this structure. Reading Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in dialogue with Frantz Fanon, Iris Marion Young and race-critical feminism, I locate in hesitation the phenomenological moment where habits of seeing can be internally (...) fractured. Hesitation, I claim, makes visible the exclusionary logic of racializing and objectifying perception, countering its affective closure and opening it to critical transformation. (shrink)

The tight connection between racial identities and roots has been called into question in recent years. The tensions between roots and routes and between authenticity and instability frame one of the central problem‐spaces in the black aesthetic tradition. In light of the role that appeals to authenticity have played in the tradition, and in light of the complications that come with those appeals, the following questions emerge: what kind of work can appeals to authenticity appropriately do; are they grounds for (...) criticism, as Lorraine Hansberry seems to think; or are they something else. This chapter addresses these questions by considering some cases such as: Sidney Kasfir's account of Germans in Yorubaland, and designs involving kente cloth. It explains at least five grades of authenticity discourse, all with their roots in the Greek word for principal or genuine (authentikós). (shrink)