Excavating the Museum of Sensory Absence: Race, Racism and the Everyday (Sensory) Experiences of Post-War Black Migrants

This study provides an understanding of ‘race’ as a complex dynamic force that underpins and permeates, through the senses, the everyday lives and experiences of racialised subjects. The study argues that the ‘senses’ are an alternative form of ‘knowledge’ or way of knowing ‘race’, racism, and ethnicity through the racialised senses. It considers how the sensibility of ‘race’ operates and structures our everyday life in ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ ways, with real effects, affects, and consequences.

This study fills the gap in various paradigms where the senses and experience have been missing, including the race relations problematic, cultural studies, and post-race theory. In addition, this research contributes to the existing body of literature and studies that have been strictly concerned with the material and structural effects of ‘race’ and racism. The aim is to make a critical intervention and offer a means of moving forward with an understanding of ‘race’ that can bridge the divide between the objective theoretical treatments of ‘race’ or its complete erasure.

Varied methodologies and analytical frameworks are used, including feminist epistemologies, critical realism, phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and grounded theory, to elucidate the racialised sense and racialised sensory epistemologies of the lived experiences of ‘race’ and racism. In addition, a multiple qualitative method will be used, involving oral histories and a range of archived, contemporary, published, and unpublished materials, including a wide range of visual resources and film. These will be applied to a local urban study of Notting Hill and neighbouring wards in North Kensington, which explores the everyday ‘sensory’ experiences of Black and minority ethnic residents against the backdrop of institutions, mechanisms, and key events from the 1950s post-war period in Britain and subsequent decades.