Affirmative critique and strange race-things: Experimenting with art-ing as analysis

Abstract

The focus of this article is affirmative critique, its ontological grounding, and a record of an attempt to perform an affirmative critical analysis with documented strange race-things. It is inspired by the debate on limitations of Enlightened critical practice, and writings on a proposed alternative; affirmative critique (Braidotti, 2011, 2013). Grounded in an ontology of difference, affirmative critique suggests to affirm and create other ways of speaking and living to ‘push power a little’ (Bunz, Kaiser, & Thiele, 2017a, p. 16). Further, it is argued that this might be a more transformative mode than the traditional Enlightened critique informing decades of multitudes of politics, perspectives and practices offered to work against how race is stubbornly becoming in unjust ways. The affirmative critical analysis performed is an experimentation with a print of a photographic image; an art-ing with data.