So Much for Today’s Obligatory Performance of Positionality!

Matt Watt

If you are tired of Goethe’s maxim ‘With every glance at the world I theorise’, then this one from the postcolony will bring you little comfort: ‘I analyse, therefore I am [an artist]’.

Contemporary art discourse often asks artists to locate themselves: to name their identity, politics, and social location upfront. In theory, this positionality awareness is meant to ground the work in authenticity and sincerity. In practice, it can become quite posturing – a performance of positionality – where checking the right boxes substitutes for deeper engagement. Even academics have noted this performative ritual; one wryly parenthesised his introduction with “So much for today’s obligatory performance of positionality!”, as if to say: There, I stated my identity – can we move on now? (Agawu et al., 2023). The irony is thick.

My enquiry is a consideration of what might happen if an artist turns the performance of positionality into well… a performance.

In art, a rigid positional stance might lock an artist into a preset narrative. If you’re X (insert identity or ideology), you’re expected to make X-like art about X-like topics. Straying beyond that can risk accusations of inauthenticity or being out of touch. But genuine exploration in art often requires straying, risking, failing. There’s a difference between drawing from one’s position and being confined by it. The latter leads to art that feels safe, even when it claims to be radical. It results in works that dutifully illustrate concepts rather than interrogating them. It’s pacifying.

Frantz Fanon, writing in the heat of anti-colonial struggle, could serve as a metaphor here. Fanon refused to remain in the comfortable role of observer or purely identitarian spokesperson. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), he infamously argued that only through direct confrontation – even violence – could the colonised break free: “At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.” (p. 147). While Fanon spoke of political and psychological liberation, one might draw a parallel to art: only through confronting the uncomfortable truths head-on can art shake off the inferiority complex of anesthetisation. Fanon’s stance wasn’t about mindless aggression; it was about reclaiming agency. Similarly, an artist can reclaim creative agency by not passively performing the role viewers expect, but by venturing into uncertain, uncomfortable territory.

To be clear, acknowledging one’s social position is not the problem – the problem is when that acknowledgement ossifies into a static identity — a brand. If an artist is forever “the victim”, “the activist”, or “the insider/outsider”, their practice has become predetermined. The performance of this positionality has become their comfort zone. It insulates both artist and audience: everyone knows what to expect, and the expectation is duly met. But art, at its most exploratory, thrives on not knowing what comes next. Predictability is a conceptualist’s worst nightmare. In Fanon’s final prayer from Black Skin, White Masks (1952: 250), he implores, “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”

(Watt, 2025)

References:

Fanon, F. (1967). The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Zagorski-Thomas, S., Agawu, K., Bhogal, G., Cavett, E., Dunsby, J., Horton, J., Monchick, A., Pace, I., & Stobart, H. (2023). Valuing the Surplus: Perspectives on Julian Horton’s Article ‘On the Musicological Necessity of Music Analysis’. Musical Quarterly, 42(3), 412–471.