Walking-with whiteness

This chapter develops a conference paper offering an iteration of walking-with (Sundberg 2013; Springgay and Truman 2018) building on Sweet Waters, a walking arts exploration of legacies of slave-ownership in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bath, UK. The project revealed obscured histories and interrogated the City’s reluctant heritage (Tomory 1999; Otele 2016) of empire and slave generated wealth. A participatory performative strategy emerges from the juxtaposition of registers of walking. The approach foregrounds corporeal and affective experience, employing the questioning tactics of 'affect aliens' (Ahmed 2010) on the official heritage narrative. Sweet Waters reveals and challenges white silence (Di Angelo 2012) through a frictional insertion into a heritage experience racialised as white. The presentation proposes a creative non-confrontational method of engagement with complex and entangled heritages towards social repair. Walkers become agents and story carriers of rich heritage narratives; the reluctance to address legacies of slave-ownership is eroded through a walking-with approach