Dear colleagues:
I'm writing on behalf of a group of White design historians in the USA to
share with you a more-than-hundred-page annotated bibliography called
Decentering
Whiteness in Design History Resources <http://bit.ly/decentering> (
bit.ly/decentering) that we built together this summer. Though our
introduction to the bibliography—like the bibliography itself—remains a
work in progress, I have pasted the current iteration of it below to
provide you with some additional information about why we created the
bibliography, how we think it could be useful to others, and how to
contribute to it.
***
Introduction
We are a group of White design historians in the USA
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KiW2ULDFeIm_OuvwhM2lygxwhoNddrEFk5tYI9zbldw/edit?pli=1#heading=h.oa00nbfshkwc>
who are working to decenter Whiteness in our design history courses and in
our work as scholars. By “decentering Whiteness,” we mean simultaneously
decentering White people within the history of American design, and
decentering North Americans and Europeans within the global history of
design.
Some of us have been working toward these goals for years, or for our
entire careers. However, we began working together to assemble this
bibliography in June, 2020, in response to our students’ demands for design
histories that accurately represent the contributions of Black, Indigenous,
Latinx, Asian, and other non-White designers, and in support of Christen A.
Smith’s Cite Black Women <https://www.citeblackwomencollective.org/>
movement and similar calls to highlight the work of Black, Indigenous,
Latinx, and Asian writers on our syllabuses.
We are acutely aware that our shared racial and national identity limits
the knowledge and constrains the perspectives we can bring to this project.
Yet we believe it’s incumbent on us as privileged White people to do as
much of this work as we can on our own, rather than (or at least prior to)
asking less-privileged people to do the work of educating us.
We are also aware that many valuable lists of resources regarding race and
racism, generally, and even a few bibliographies addressing race and racism
in the field of design, specifically, have been circulating widely during
the summer of 2020. These include, among others, AIGA DEC’s *Anti-Racism,
Equity, and Inclusion Resources Archive*, Ramón Tejada’s collaborative
project The decolonizing, or puncturing, or de-Westernizing design Reader V4,
Kimberly Jenkins’s The Fashion and Race Database
<https://fashionandrace.org/>, and Rikki Byrd’s The Fashion and Race
Syllabus <https://fashionandrace.wordpress.com/>. We support, applaud, and
have benefited from all these resources, and did not want to colonize them,
distort them, or diminish their usefulness to their originators by bending
them to suit our own purposes. We therefore chose to create a new
bibliography.
What we think distinguishes this bibliography from others we’ve seen is:
1.
Its focus on race and ethnicity, specifically, in design history.
Gender, sexuality, class, nationality, (dis)ability, age, size, and
religion all have profound implications for the study of design history,
and many of us focus on one or more of these dimensions of identity in our
own work. But at this historical moment in mid-2020, we feel that design
history instructors’ single most urgent need is for resources about race
and ethnicity. We have therefore confined this document to sources that
explicitly address racial/ethnic identities and/or the intersections of
race/ethnicity with other aspects of identity.
1.
its attention to the field of design history as a whole, rather than a
single subfield. Our teaching and research spans at least four major
subfields of design—graphic/interaction, craft/industrial,
textiles/fashion, and interiors/architecture—so we’ve made an effort to
ensure that all of them are well represented in this document.
1.
its theoretical and political range. The items on this list support the
study of race and ethnicity from many different disciplinary and
theoretical/political perspectives.
1.
its flexible, expansive definition of design. White men have
historically policed the boundaries of the design professions quite
vigorously, and as a result, “design” has, almost by definition, excluded
the activities of most women and people of color. In contrast, we
understand design to occur within a network of producers, laborers,
intermediaries/mediators, consumers, and users, so the entries in this
bibliography span the gamut from high-status, “professional,”
public-facing, and innovation- and profit-seeking design activities to
informal, everyday, “amateur,” private, self-fashioning, and
convention-following design activities.
1.
its thematic rather than stylistic or chronological organization. We
propose that decentering Whiteness entails (among other things) organizing
courses around themes other than canonical Western styles, movements, and
designers. The headings and subheadings that emerged organically as we
grouped (and continue to group and regroup) these entries into logical
clusters could, we realized recently, also be used as themes around which
to structure a design history course.
1.
its complete bibliographic information. We hope that providing a
complete bibliographic entry for each item—rather than merely a link that
may go dead in a few years—will ensure this resource has enduring value not
only for faculty assembling syllabuses, but also for students writing
papers and scholars conducting research.
1.
its annotations. One of the greatest contributions we think this
bibliography makes to the field is its annotations, which enable readers to
discern at a glance—without, or at least before, clicking on a link—what a
source is about and, in some cases, how other instructors have found it
useful in their teaching. We’ve already annotated many/most of the sources
on this list, and are working steadily to annotate the rest .
1.
its system of hashtags. We’re still in the throes of systematically
tagging each entry to make it easy for readers to locate entries on
specific themes, regions, time periods, and groups of people. Notably,
there are no hashtags for Western style names or movements, which is a
feature, not a bug, of this bibliography. Readers can of course hit
Command+F/Ctrl+F and perform a natural-language search for the words Art
Nouveau, but we suggest instead that they consider searching for the
hashtags #1850-1900 and #1900-1940, which will reveal a wealth of other
themes they could fruitfully explore alongside or even instead of Art
Nouveau.
The hashtags have proven to be one of the thorniest challenges we’ve faced
in assembling this bibliography, and we are still working through how best
to deploy them. We’re agreed that in contrast to the standard practice of
“marking” all racial identities other than White and leaving Whiteness
“unmarked,” we will (soon!) tag #WhiteAuthors and #WhiteDesigners. However,
identifying the race, ethnicity, and gender of designers and authors has
proven to be a very fraught enterprise. Recognizing that racial identities
are inherently complex and fluid, we are committed to honoring the terms
that designers and authors use(d) to self-identify, when we are able to
determine what those terms are/were. On the other hand, we recognize that
readers who do not know the names of (m)any #BlackAuthors and
#BlackDesigners will find it unnecessarily challenging to locate their
works in this document if they must search using many different
self-identified terms, such as #Black, #AfricanAmerican, #AfroCaribbean,
#AfroBrazilian, #African, and—in the case of historical figures—#Colored
and #Negro. In short, we are very wary of imposing racial, ethnic, or
gender descriptors on individuals who, for example, may self-identify
neither as #Black nor as #women, but to help those who are trying to Cite
Black Women, we may need to. We are still grappling with how best to
balance our desire to honor designers’ and authors’ self-descriptors with
our desire to make it as easy as possible for others to find, cite, and
assign their work.
We are actively and continuously adding new entries and annotating and
tagging existing ones. We have a lot of work still to do. But we know there
is an urgent need for a resource like this one. We are sharing this
bibliography publicly now, in its incomplete state, in hopes that it will
prove useful to others with similar teaching goals. It will continue to
change and grow, as, no doubt, will we.
Authors/editors
Victoria Rose Pass
<https://www.mica.edu/undergraduate-majors-minors/art-history-theory-and-criticism-major/victoria-pass/>
(#VRP), MICA, began this document, and invited the following folks to
contribute:
Matthew Bird <https://www.risd.edu/people/matthew-bird/> (#MB), RISD
Carma Gorman <https://designcreativetech.utexas.edu/carma-gorman> (#CRG),
The University of Texas at Austin
Elizabeth Guffey
<https://www.purchase.edu/live/profiles/498-elizabeth-guffey> (#EG),
Purchase College
Brockett Horne
<https://www.mica.edu/undergraduate-majors-minors/graphic-design-major/brockett-horne/>
(#BH), MICA
Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler
<https://www.cla.purdue.edu/facultyStaff/profiles/new/newfaculty-16/Kaufmann-Buhler._Jennifer.html>
(#JKB), Purdue University
Anca I. Lasc <https://www.pratt.edu/faculty_and_staff/bio/?id=alasc> (#AL),
Pratt
Yelena McLane <https://interiordesign.fsu.edu/yelena-mclane/> (#YM),
Florida State University
Erica Morawski
<https://www.pratt.edu/faculty_and_staff/bio?id=YzR1RGtHUnZCNWRWb25ETHh2SEhqZz09>
(#EM), Pratt
Gretchen Von Koenig <https://www.gvonkoenig.com/> (#GVK),
Parsons/NJIT/Michael Graves School of Design
Bess Williamson <https://www.saic.edu/profiles/faculty/bess-williamson>
(#BW), School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Kristina Wilson <https://www2.clarku.edu/faculty/facultybio.cfm?id=472>
(#KW), Clark University
Sara Reed
<https://arts.vcu.edu/community/vcuarts-faculty-and-staff/directory/sara-desvernine-reed/>
(#SDR), VCU
***
*CARMA GORMAN, Ph.D., *Associate Professor (she/her/hers)
The University of Texas at Austin | Department of Design
School of Design & Creative Technologies | College of Fine Arts
512-471-0901 | ART 1.218 | designcreativetech.utexas.edu
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