Containment as Neocolonial Visual Rhetoric: Fashion, Yellowface, and Karl Lagerfeld's “Idea of China”

Staying quiet or rocking the boat? An autoethnography of organisational visual white supremacy

“…Taken together, the vignettes illustrated how visual forms can enact and reinforce the dominance of whiteness through the embodied materiality of organisations and highlighted broader considerations of how organisational visuals can be created, exhibited and framed by white people for their own benefit. Where existing studies of visual racism have focused on the stereotypical misrepresentations of people of colour and other subdominant groups (Hardy and Phillips, 1999;Meyer et al, 2013;Pérez Huber and Solórzano, 2015;Schroeder and Borgerson, 2005;Vats and Nishime, 2013;Yosso and García, 2010), our examples showed how visuals can also accompany other forms of narration to marginalise people of colour. Each example functions as racial microaggressions (Pérez Huber and Solórzano, 2015) that feature in the mundane visual and aesthetic dimensions of the workplace (the staff coffee station, department and faculty meetings, the campus grounds) and perpetuates the dominant role of whiteness in defining people of colour and determining the terms of inclusion and exclusion in organisations.…”

“…Like the organisational visuals research, visual racism has predominantly focused on harmful stereotypical (mis)representations, but tends to engage more explicitly with interrogating whiteness in its visual forms. For example, Vats and Nishime (2013) meticulously deconstruct Karl Lagerfeld's filmic homage to Coco Chanel, Paris-Shanghai: A Fantasy, and detail how visual racism, including the use of yellowface, inscribe Orientalist fantasies of China that limit the subjectivity of the racial Other and consolidates whiteness. Analysing Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers, Yosso and García (2010) reveal how Hollywood films perpetuate stereotypical images of Latinas/os as cholos and hot tempered harlots, constructing them as a problem requiring "white saviours" to fix.…”

“…In this paper, we explore visuals at the intersection of organisation studies and CRT literatures in order to theorise a form of "organisational visual racism". Where both literatures have predominantly explored visuals critically via the misrepresentations of social groups (Hardy and Phillips, 1999;Meyer et al, 2013;Pérez Huber and Solórzano, 2015;Schroeder and Borgerson, 2005;Vats and Nishime, 2013;Yosso and García, 2010), we seek to extend visual racism theory by suggesting another form of visual racismvisual white supremacythat enacts and reinforces the dominance of whiteness in post-colonial nations such as Australia.…”

Othering and Fear

“…He may not leave on his own accord; like those in Asian countries colonized by imperial rule (Emery, 1997; Said, 1978), Hiro must receive permission from Sir Topham Hatt to travel outside of Sodor, even though Hiro is older, was forgotten earlier by Sir Topham Hatt and his colleagues, and Hiro nearly dies in providing labor for Sir Topham Hatt's company. The latent message contained herein is that those that are othered have boundaries for their agency that regulate difference within society and that are policed by those in the dominant population (Vats & Nishime, 2013). Just as Thomas was depicted as empowered to interrogate Hiro upon meeting him, Sir Topham Hatt is depicted as the one in control of Hiro's fate, not Hiro himself.…”

Unmasking “ignorance”

“…As Anjali Vats and Leilani Nishime suggest, racial rhetorical containment "elevates and normalizes" dominant values, further securing the discursive hold of white supremacy. 11 A discourse of regulation and control, it organizes race, bounding the ways that raced bodies move, both literally and figuratively. 12 Advancing these arguments, we situate contemporary narratives surrounding voting restrictions-whether cast in accounts of those arrested for illegal voting or those detailing excessive delays in voting practices-within racial rhetorical containment and argue that the seemingly disparate reports of arrests for illegal voting and excessive voting delays converge; odd bedmates in a larger discourse of racial containment.…”