Food for thought: decolonial dining and dreaming as anti-racist praxis

Can an art practice using porcelain shed light on colonial histories of white oppression and encourage constructive dialogue about the ongoing role of ideological whiteness in racial injustice? As a precious white commodity so entangled with the material culture of European empires, porcelain is perhaps an apt tool with which to facilitate discussions of whiteness as a focus for liberatory anti-racism. In collaboration with participants at workshops and ‘happenings’, I employ a deliberately decolonial methodology to ‘imagine otherwise’ (Sharpe 2016; Olufemi, 2021) as a praxis of resistance, to envision ‘the marvelous’ of a socially just future. These occasions encourage a witnessing of plural perspectives – listening, hearing, holding and embodying others’ voices, experiences and feelings. This presentation focuses on one such event, a Decolonial Dreaming Dinner, and questions whether creating such a space allows us to begin to digest the unpalatable realities of white oppression sufficiently to imagine material and structural change. The work centres communion and futurity, inspired by Fred Moten’s concept (after Denise Ferreira da Silva) of the condition in which we live being one of “difference without separability” (Moten 2014) – dreaming and dining in the service of resistance and liberation.