The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History [1 ed.] 9780367714819, 9780367714826, 9781003152262

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO DECOLONIZING ART HISTORY

This companion is the first global, comprehensive text to explicate, theorize, and propose decolonial methodologies for art historians, museum professionals, artists, and other visual culture scholars, teachers, and practitioners. Art history as a discipline and its corollary institutions—the museum, the art market— are not only products of colonial legacies but active agents in the consolidation of empire and the construction of the West. The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History joins the growing critical discourse around the decolonial through an assessment of how art history may be rethought and mobilized in the service of justice—racial, gender, social, environmental, restorative, and more. This book draws attention to the work of artists, art historians, and scholars in related fields who have been engaging with disrupting master narratives and forging new directions, often within a hostile academy or an indifferent art world. The volume unpacks the assumptions projected onto objects of art and visual culture and the discourse that contains them. It equally addresses the manifold complexities around representation as visual and discursive praxis through a range of epistemologies and metaphors originated outside or against the logic of modernity. This companion is organized into four thematic sections: Being and Doing, Learning and Listening, Sensing and Seeing, and Living and Loving. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, museum studies, race and ethnic studies, cultural studies, disability studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Tatiana Flores is Jefferson Scholars Foundation Edgar F. Shannon Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. Florencia San Martín is an assistant professor of Art History in the Department of Art, Architecture and Design at Lehigh University. Charlene Villaseñor Black is chair of the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, editor of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and founding editor-in-chief of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO DECOLONIZING ART HISTORY

Edited by Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martín, and Charlene Villaseñor Black

Designed cover image: Firelei Báez, Untitled (Anacaona), 2020. Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas. 96 3/8×127 3/8 in. (244.6×323.5 cm). Collection of the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle. First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martín, and Charlene Villaseñor Black; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martín, and Charlene Villaseñor Black to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Flores, Tatiana, editor. | San Martín, Florencia, editor. | Villaseñor Black, Charlene, 1962– editor. Title: The Routledge companion to decolonizing art history / edited by Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martín, and Charlene Villaseñor Black. Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023020070 (print) | LCCN 2023020071 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367714819 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367714826 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003152262 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art—Historiography—Methodology. | Museums—Philosophy. | Eurocentrism. | Decolonization. Classification: LCC N7480 .R68 2024 (print) | LCC N7480 (ebook) | DDC 709—dc23/eng/20230825 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020070 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020071 ISBN: 9780367714819 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367714826 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003152262 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

In honor of past worlds and our ancestors, dedicated to current and future generations

CONTENTS

List of contributors

xii

SECTION I

Introduction1 Introduction3 Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martín, and Charlene Villaseñor Black SECTION II

Being and Doing

47

  1 Writing Art History in the Age of Black Lives Matter Eddie Chambers

49

  2 Being an Indigenous Art Historian in the Twenty-First Century: How Can Māori Adornment Reveal New Ways of Thinking about Art, Its Histories, and Futures Ngarino Ellis   3 Reinvention at the Wheel: Shaping New Histories in the Decolonization of Disability Amanda Cachia   4 The Power of Absence: An Interview with Ken Gonzales-Day Tatiana Flores

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61

73 84

Contents

  5 Art in Paradise Found and Lost LeGrace Benson

96

 6 The Maquette-Modèles of Bodys Isek Kingelez: Creole Visions of Decolonial Monuments Sandrine Colard

105

 7 Decolonizing La Revolución: Cuban Artistic Practice in a Liminal Space María de Lourdes Mariño Fernández

117

  8 Museums Are Temples of Whiteness Sumaya Kassim

128

  9 Stepping Out of the Shadow of Imperial Monochrony: A PlaceCentric Approach to Decolonizing Japanese Art History Akiko Walley

139

10 On Failure and the Nation-State: A Decolonial Reading of Alfredo Jaar’s A Logo for America Florencia San Martín

151

11 Light as a Feather: The Anti-Capitalist Radiance of Decolonial Art History Wendy M. K. Shaw

164

SECTION III

Learning and Listening

183

12 Where’s Decolonization? The Ohketeau Cultural Center, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Arts Institutions Rhonda Anderson and Larry Spotted Crow Mann, with Jonathan P. Eburne, Stacy Klein, and Carlos Uriona 13 Overcoming Art History’s Meta-Narrative Deborah Hutton 14 Pathways to Art History: Pedagogy, Research, and Praxis through a Decolonial Lens Ananda Cohen-Aponte 15 Pedagogies of Place: Listening and Learning in the Margins Keg de Souza

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207 218

Contents

16 The Unbearable Lightness of Adjuncting Art History Claire Raymond

228

17 Decolonial Cinematic Flows: Histories, Movements, Confluences Dalida María Benfield

240

18 Re-indigenizing Ancient Mexican Glyphic Codices Felicia Rhapsody Lopez

251

19 (Not) Performing Pasifika Indigeneity: Destabilizing the Researcher as Decolonizing Method in Art History Amelia Jones

263

20 Afterlives/Futurelives: Imagining Mermaids and Recalling Ghost Dancing274 Roshini Kempadoo 21 Decolonizing California Mission Art and Architecture Studies Yve Chavez 22 Radical Pedagogy: Environmental Performances and the Politics of Hope Jane Chin Davidson

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SECTION IV

Sensing and Seeing

313

23 Spooky Art History (or, Whatever Happened to the Postcolonial?) Kajri Jain

315

24 Spatial Abstraction as a Colonizing Tool Fernando Luiz Lara

331

25 Dishumanizing Art History? Carolyn Dean

342

26 The Digital Voice as Postcolonial Proxy Pamela N. Corey

353

27 Reflecting on Whiteness in Recent Contemporary Artwork Exploring Transnational Poland Alpesh Kantilal Patel

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Contents

28 Racialization, Creolization, and Minor Transnationalism: Black and Indigenous Exchange in Spanish Colonial Visual Culture Elena FitzPatrick Sifford

374

29 The Imperial Landscape of Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Portraiture385 Zirwat Chowdhury 30 Unseeing Art History: Inca Material Culture Andrew James Hamilton

398

31 Debility and the Ethics of Proximity: Spatial and Temporal Immediacy in the Work of Candice Lin Hentyle Yapp

409

32 Decolonizing Crocodiles, Repatriating Birds: Human-Animal Relations in the Indian Landscape Tamara Sears

419

33 “We Are So Many Bodies, My Friends”: Countervisibility as Resurgent Tactics Sarita Echavez See

432

SECTION V

Living and Loving

445

34 “She Carried with Her … A Large Bundle of Wearing Apparel Belonging to Herself”: Slave Dress as Resistance in Portraiture and Fugitive Slave Advertisements Charmaine A. Nelson 35 Rina Banerjee’s Decolonial Ecologies Rebecca M. Brown 36 The Teaching Is in the Making: A Relational and Embodied Experience of Anishinaabe Photographs Celeste Pedri-Spade 37 Reflections on a Latinx Decolonial Praxis for Medievalists Roland Betancourt

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447 459

470 482

Contents

38 The Waters Surrounding Wallmapu, the Waters Surrounding Life Seba Calfuqueo

493

39 Dialogical Episodes for Decolonizing (Art) History Ana María Reyes

503

40 Inner Spaces: The Depth Imagination Elizabeth DeLoughrey

519

41 Maria Auxiliadora da Silva: Nossa Mãe Maria of Terreiro Life and Faith on Black Grounds Genevieve Hyacinthe

531

42 Michael Richards: Performance as Ritual and Black-Indigenous Haptic Visuality Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa

544

43 Bittersweet Histories and Tarnished Gold: Slavery’s Sounds, Sights, and Silences in the Legacy of Dutch Brazil Anuradha Gobin

555

44 A Personal Take, or Stuck in the Middle/Side and Going Nowhere: An Attempt at Imagining a Methodology for Engaging Colonial Photographic Archives, Histories, and Subjectivities George Mahashe

568

SECTION VI

Afterword581 45 Towards a Combative Decolonial Aesthetics Nelson Maldonado-Torres

583

Index591

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CONTRIBUTORS

Rhonda Anderson, Iñupiaq Athabaskan, co-founder and co-director of Ohketeau Cultural Center and Native Youth Empowerment Foundation, Western Massachusetts Commissioner on Indian Affairs, Mother, Herbalist, Artist, and Activist. Dalida María Benfield is the research and program director of the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research. LeGrace Benson is the director at Arts of Haiti Research Project and co-chair of the Working Group on Environment for Haitian Studies Association. Roland Betancourt is a professor of Art History and affiliate faculty in Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Rebecca M. Brown is a professor in the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. Amanda Cachia is an assistant professor of Arts Leadership in the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts at the University of Houston, where she serves the Graduate degree in Arts Leadership, the Graduate Certificate in Museum and Gallery Management, and the Graduate Certificate in Arts and Health. Seba Calfuqueo is a Mapuche artist based in Chile. Eddie Chambers holds the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professorship in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin and is the current editor-in-chief of Art Journal. Yve Chavez is a member of the Gabrieleno Tongva San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians and an assistant professor of Art History in the School of Visual Arts at the University of Oklahoma.

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Contributors

Jane Chin Davidson is a professor of Art History and Global Cultures in the Department of Art and Design at California State University, San Bernardino. Zirwat Chowdhury is an assistant professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Ananda Cohen-Aponte is an associate professor of Art History in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University. Sandrine Colard is an assistant professor of Art History in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University-Newark and Curator-At-Large at KANAL-Centre Pompidou, Brussels. Pamela Nguyen Corey is an associate professor of Art History in the Art and Media Studies program at Fulbright University Vietnam. Carolyn Dean is a distinguished professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Elizabeth DeLoughrey is a professor in the English Department and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. Keg de Souza is an artist of Goan heritage who lives and works on unceded Gadigal land. Jonathan P. Eburne is a professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French and Francophone studies at Pennsylvania State University. Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) is an associate professor of Art History in the Department of Art History at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Elena FitzPatrick Sifford is an associate professor of Art History and director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Baker Center for the Arts at Muhlenberg College. Anuradha Gobin is an associate professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Calgary. Ken Gonzales-Day is an artist and Fletcher Jones Chair of the Art Department at Scripps College. Andrew James Hamilton is an associate curator of Arts of the Americas at the Art ­Institute of Chicago and lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Deborah Hutton is a professor of Art History in the School of the Arts and Communication at the College of New Jersey. Genevieve Hyacinthe is an associate professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture Program at California College of the Arts.

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Contributors

Kajri Jain is a professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. Amelia Jones is the Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Faculty and Research at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California. Sumaya Kassim is an independent writer, curator and researcher based in the UK. Roshini Kempadoo is an artist and a professor in the School of Media Arts and Design at the University of Westminster. Stacy Klein is the founder and director of Double Edge Theatre, a cultural cooperative and ensemble collective now located in rural western MA. Fernando Luiz Lara is a professor of Architecture in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Felicia Rhapsody Lopez is an assistant professor of Chicanx Studies and English at the University of California, Merced. George Mahashe is a senior lecturer at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town and convenor for ‘––defunct context’, a series of timber pavilion interventions emanating from his contemplations on the Anthropology Museum at the University of Witwatersrand. Nelson Maldonado-Torres is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, Professor Extraordinarious at the University of South Africa, and honorary professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. A former president of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, he co-chairs the Frantz Fanon Foundation with its founder, Mireille Fanon Mendès France. Larry Spotted Crow Mann is the founder and co-director of the Ohketeau Cultural Center, award-winning author, and citizen of the Nipmuc Tribe of Massachusetts. María de Lourdes Mariño Fernández is an independent curator and a Ph.D. candidate in the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. Charmaine A. Nelson is Provost Professor of Art History in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, and director of the Slavery North Initiative in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa is an artist, writer, and educator who holds a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies from Stanford University. She is Associate Director of Stanford Living Education where she leads the LifeWorks Program for Integrative Learning. Alpesh Kantilal Patel is an associate professor in the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.

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Contributors

Celeste Pedri-Spade is an Ojibwe artist and associate provost (Indigenous Initiatives) and associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. Claire Raymond is a poet and art historian who teaches on art history and American Studies for the University of Maine, Bates College, and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Ana María Reyes is an associate professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University and founding member of the Symbolic Reparations Research Project. Tamara Sears is an associate professor of Art History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and Vice President of the American Council for Southern Asian Art. Sarita Echavez See is a professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Wendy M. K. Shaw is a professor of the Art History of Islamic Cultures at the Free University Berlin. Carlos Uriona is a co-artistic director of Double Edge Theatre and an actor, creator, training leader, puppeteer, and grassroots organizer originally from Argentina. Akiko Walley is the Maude I. Kerns Associate Professor of Japanese Art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, College of Design, at the University of Oregon. Hentyle Yapp is an associate professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego.

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SECTION I

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martín, and Charlene Villaseñor Black

Decolonizing Art History in Pandemic Times The preparation of this volume was bookended by events that laid bare how the legacy of European colonialism not only reverberates in the present as aftershocks of encounters that began well over half a millennium ago but persists as an active agent in supporting and maintaining the colonial structures, institutions, and belief systems we have inherited. The book’s inception coincided with the catastrophe of COVID-19 just as it was about to be declared a global pandemic in March 2020, and the process of readying the manuscript for submission synchronized with the death of the monarch Queen Elizabeth II of England. Between the callousness of the Western world to the enormous, ever-growing death toll and the seemingly endless press coverage of the queen’s funeral—which prevented major news outlets from reporting on the consequences of Hurricane Fiona, a Category 4 storm, as it churned across the Caribbean—the reassertion of the West as dominant world power rang loud and clear. Efforts to preserve what Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano described as the “colonial power matrix,” in this case, the hegemony of the United States and Western Europe, have always existed but often have operated covertly; the pandemic put them on full display.1 What is the role of art history—whose existence is imbricated in European colonialism—to evaluating these inherited systems and institutions, coming to terms with the discipline’s complicity in perpetuating them, and assuming the consequences of being regarded as a problem rather than a solution? To forge ahead towards ethically grounded and social justice-driven futures, might art history embrace humility against its assumed authority and open itself up to learning from others, especially those whose knowledges it has devalued and ignored? We believe that there is no other option, and the pandemic has impressed on us the urgency of this task. If art history does not accept its necessary comeuppance and remake itself—honestly and with integrity—it will be rendered obsolete.2 The mostly devastating events of the 2020s have shocked and infuriated but also given us reason to hope, reinvigorated our sense of community, and stimulated new alliances. The murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020, followed in short succession by the killings of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery in the United States, galvanized a social movement for racial justice that shook the status quo and unequivocally 3 DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-2

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exposed the systemic racism, oppressive structures, and white supremacist worldviews at the heart of the US national project. The following year, the discovery of 1,300 unmarked graves in former campuses of residential schools for Indigenous children in Western Canada brought renewed attention to settler colonial strategies of forced assimilation and “aggressive civilization” implemented in North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and triggered traumatic memories for the victims (see Figure 0.1).3 The resurgence of Black Lives Matter and historic elections of firsts—women presidents in Honduras, Barbados, and Slovenia, a Black woman vice president in Colombia, and a woman prime minister in Tunisia—were countered with insurrection in the heart of the United States government and later Brazil; a chilling embrace of ethnonationalisms across Europe, India, China, and New Zealand; and renewed repression and state-sanctioned violence against women, girls, and those in solidarity with them in Iran and Afghanistan. The Amazon burned, Australia burned, the US American West burned, Europe sweltered, Pakistan (and many other places) flooded, and the ice caps melted. Statues were toppled in spectacular fashion, and, shockingly, some of the Benin Bronzes—a collection of reliefs and sculptures looted by the British from the Edo Kingdom (in present-day Nigeria) in the nineteenth century—were repatriated.4 Museums withstood attacks on their MVPs (Most Valuable Philanthropists) and either emerged unscathed to continue business as usual or accepted resignations, sought to build meaningful new relationships, explored a different set of narratives and approaches, and acceded to union demands.5 The COVID lockdowns inaugurated a new chapter in the history of telecommunications, exacerbating economic disparities while showcasing to what degree it was possible for certain sectors to live a full and active life while barely leaving home. The titans of e-commerce and social m ­ edia—among them, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter (now X)—gained ever greater influence over global

Figure 0.1  Students at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Carlisle Pennsylvania, ca. 1900. Courtesy of the Cumberland County Historical Society.

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Introduction

geopolitics, their CEOs flaunting their dominion in the manner of absolute m ­ onarchs. Two crucial sites of anticolonial struggle in the Caribbean, Haiti and Cuba, were shaken by major events: unprecedented island-wide protests against the Cuban communist government beginning in 2020 and the assassination of the Haitian president followed by a massive earthquake in 2022. The NASA rover landed on Mars to look for evidence of life as we wonder how long our own planet will be able to sustain human and other lifeforms. Care, self-care, and practices of healing and mutual aid became central concerns as people grieved for lost loved ones, ancestors, the planet, and themselves. The United States withdrew from Afghanistan after a 20-year occupation, and in a bid to maintain its Cold War sphere of influence, Russia invaded Ukraine. Violence continued unabated, from normalized state aggressions and everyday manifestations of misogyny, homo- and transphobia, and racism, to hate crimes that jolted the world: anti-Asian violence across the West and the massacre of 21 victims—mostly of Mexican descent, 19 of them children—in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, as 376 law enforcement officers stood idly by, allowing the shooter free rein for over one hour. These events result from or respond to colonial structures that have been integral to the formation of the modern world. Philosopher Enrique Dussel posits that 1492 marks “the beginning of the ‘world-system’” because prior to that “empires or cultural systems simply coexisted.”6 He regards expansion by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century and Spain’s “discovery” of America as catalysts for a modern conception of the world that put Europe at the center. The years leading up to 1992, the quincentenary of Columbus’s landing in the Western Hemisphere, provoked a generative critical response, focusing on subaltern counternarratives to European history (see Figure 0.2). In this context, Quijano’s concept of the “coloniality of power” became central to the emergence of a new body of theory on decoloniality by scholars from Latin America, including Dussel, Walter D. Mignolo, María Lugones, and Arturo Escobar.7 Their work shifted the focus away from Eurocentric understandings of history and subjecthood to foreground anti-colonial struggles, among them Indigenous and African rebellions in the Americas; the Haitian Revolution; the writings of intellectuals from the Black Radical tradition, such as W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey; mid-twentieth-century thinkers and activists from the Caribbean and Africa, among them Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Kwame Nkrumah, and Frantz Fanon; theories of liberation, critical pedagogy, and feminism developed since the 1960s by intellectuals from the Americas, including Paulo Freire, Sylvia Wynter, bell hooks, and Gloria Anzaldúa; and discourse on postcolonialism from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa, from authors  such as Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the Subaltern Studies group, and V. Y. Mudimbe. The notion of a “decolonial turn” emerged in 2005 at a conference at the University of California, Berkeley, organized by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, one of our contributors, who adopted the phrase as “a way of articulating the massive theoretical and epistemological breakthroughs in the works of Third World” thinkers.8 Contributor Sarita Echavez See was among the first to apply the vocabulary of decolonization to visual arts practice in The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (2009), as was Guisela LaTorre in Walls of Empowerment: Chicana/o Indigenist Murals of California (2008).9 As the imperative to decolonize began to catch on, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang published the groundbreaking essay “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” (2012) from the perspective of Native studies, calling attention to the mechanisms of settler colonialism—a condition that arises when “the colonizer comes to stay,” as happened in many of the countries of the Americas and the 5

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Figure 0.2  Antonio Turok, The Collapse of the Conquistador Don Diego de Mazariegos, Chiapas, Mexico, 1992.

6

Introduction

Pacific—and asserting that “decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted.”10 The discourse on settler colonialism has productively complicated conversations around decoloniality. Amy Lonetree’s 2012 monograph Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums, at the intersections of ethnic studies, anthropology, museology, and art history, laid foundational groundwork for art historians, centering Native perspectives in revisions of museum practice, art history, and artistic creation.11 More recent trends involve museum workers taking matters into their own hands to clamor for change and break institutional cultures of silence. The Instagram account Change the Museum (https://www.instagram.com/changethemuseum/), established in 2020, shares stories—posted anonymously but verified by the ­moderators—of toxic work environments, racism, sexism, exploitation, and intimidation at specific museums. LaTanya S. Autry in the United States and contributor Sumaya Kassim in the United Kingdom have gone public on their experiences of frustration, gaslighting, censorship, and trauma as women of color working for change against recalcitrant institutions to become leading advocates in challenging the authority of the museum.12 Various thinkers recognize the importance of the image to decolonizing projects. Indigenous Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in her theory of the “sociology of the image” argues for the particular power of images to unmask or reveal ideas hidden by official censorship in textual sources: “Words do not signify, but instead conceal.”13 Ethnic studies scholar Laura E. Pérez recognizes the visual arts as “valuable laboratories for creating relevant new forms of thought […] [through] nonverbal form.”14 Due to their aptitude for condensation, suggestion, insinuation, as well as visual artists’ capacity to signal unfixed, evolving, even uncertain meanings, art can serve as a vehicle for diverse viewpoints—­institutional barriers notwithstanding—giving voice to ideas deemed too dangerous for print. By their nature, artworks evoke a wider, more complex range of interconnections than texts do, allowing for an expansive array of affective, kinesthetic, and intellectual responses. Anthropologist Néstor García Canclini notes how artists “are freer than social scientists to use metaphors to express condensations and uncertain meanings that we cannot formulate as concepts.”15 He credits the literary and visual arts for “giv[ing] more resonance to voices that come from diverse places in society, listening to those voices in ways that others don’t, turning them into something that political, sociological, or religious discourses can’t.”16 Transfeminist Sayak Valencia and others have suggested ways to reclaim images from capitalism’s grip, cannibalizing and reappropriating this visual language in order to “produce dissidence and interference.”17 Such critiques issue from members of marginalized communities, “the voices” of those from the “sexual, racial, corporeal, and geographical ­periphery (transbordermestizxs).”18 Valencia links this reappropriation of visual codes to “the reclamation of alternative sexual practices from a transfeminist perspective,” because such practices cross “race, class, and decoloniality,” thereby disrupting globalization, a “project of economic recolonization,” and its attendant violence.19 The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History joins this critical discourse through a specific assessment of how art history may be rethought and mobilized in the service of justice—racial, gender, social, environmental, restorative, and more—through which we emerge firm in our conviction that other worlds are possible. As editors, we approach this project as a celebration of the work that our contributors and many other artists, curators, activists, cultural workers, educators, and scholars—all of them courageous and uncompromising—have undertaken, often at great personal cost and emotional toll. 7

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Art history as a discipline and its corollary institutions—the museum, the art market—are not only products of colonial legacies, but active agents in the consolidation of empire, the construction of the West, the naturalization of Eurocentrism, and the reproduction of white supremacy, all the while giving the false impression that their authority is somehow neutral.20 In the past decade, the imperative to decolonize has become commonplace, moving from the classroom to the street and back, and from academic parlance to marketing strategy. The current trendiness has made the decolonial an object of growing skepticism and heated debates that multiplied over the course of the pandemic. Meanwhile, the erosion of academic freedom has been undeniable, and threats to free speech in the classroom are currently making their way through US courts.21 Already, the interference of state governments in public university curricula through intimidation tactics has resulted in professors self-censoring.22 Politicized battles over education there have been waged on the teaching of critical race theory—an approach that lays bare how inequality is historically reproduced so that it becomes naturalized, leading to structural and systemic racism.23 As AfricanAmerican lawyer and activist Audra Wilson explains, “Through their efforts to rewrite our racist history and how it impacts the present, opponents to progress are trying to hinder the education of our future leaders and further marginalize the lived experience of people of color.”24 This statement takes on added urgency in the aftermath of the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision to abolish affirmative action—a corrective against systemic racism, discrimination, and historical injustices against minoritized communities—in college admissions.25 Similarly, art history has been elitist, exclusionary, and out of reach for all but the most privileged. The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History heeds Sylvia Wynter’s call: “We must now collectively undertake a rewriting of knowledge as we know it.”26 The essays collected here unpack the assumptions projected onto objects of visual culture and the built environment and the discourse that contains them. They equally draw attention to the manifold complexities around representation as visual, material, and discursive praxis through a range of epistemologies and metaphors originated outside or against the logic of Eurocentrism. As Macarena Gómez-Barris writes, “If we only track the purview of power’s destruction and death force, we are forever analytically imprisoned to reproducing a totalizing viewpoint that ignores life that is unbridled and finds forms of resisting and living alternatively.”27 In our field, the value of art is not a metaphysical abstraction; it is monetary, and to decolonize a discipline whose Eurocentric master narratives support a culture of accumulation of arbitrarily priced goods, a reverence towards individuals deemed exceptional (but who also happen, overwhelmingly, to be white and male), and a country club attitude of exclusion seems a daunting task. Indeed, given these attributes, it is often difficult to defend the field from its detractors. But change is afoot, even if the pace feels glacial, and the momentum must continue. The museum demands accountability, and public pressure yields results. Regrettably, the call to decolonize art history is challenged by the ways in which art institutions and even certain academic departments rely on a culture of private funding that is increasingly tied to the billionaire class. The dependence on philanthropy to support the arts and humanities shows no signs of abating. Foundations appear to offer the only hope of growing or maintaining programs, as the pandemic propelled unpopular austerity measures in higher education. Academics across the United Kingdom faced draconian pension cuts, and the downsizing of humanities departments already underway grew exponentially. The allocation of public funds for universities shrank to unprecedented levels, and multiple art history departments in the United States were shuttered.28 8

Introduction

As profit-driven attitudes towards education took greater hold, these cuts ­became naturalized as financially necessary. College Art Association (CAA)—the primary professional organization for art history, studio art, and related fields in the United States—shied away from its advocacy mission when asked by members in an open letter to “step up and make noise” against the current spate of layoffs and closures affecting art historians.29 The Association’s response signaled a capitulation to the neoliberal takeover of academia: CAA cannot stop any institution of art, design or art-history from the decision, necessitated by financial situation or otherwise, to close. To best support our community, as a part of our ongoing repositioning and digital transformation, CAA has identified the importance and continued growth of an e-learning model and publications to recognize and support those currently and who continue to be affected.30 When the biggest threat to art history as an academic discipline is posed by the very association that exists to protect it, it is clear the field needs to recalibrate, reorganize, find new allies, and shed unnecessary baggage. The American Historical Association has similarly been called out for its failure to advocate. As historian Erin Bartram wrote, The field is facing an existential crisis, and addressing it should be the main concern of its leadership…. If the leaders of this organization don’t know how to do this—if they do not understand the gravity of the situation, if they are too scared to make waves, if they are lacking the capacity and training to do this work—they should step aside, and the organization should figure out how to elect, employ, and pay the people who do know how to do it.31 Native American (Cherokee) art historian Lara M. Evans made explicit how downsizing efforts serve the cause of white supremacy by maintaining the status quo in art history: Dismantling art history programs is one way to block … shifting the art world from a White art world to a more diverse and equitable art world … It’s devastating that at a time when there is so much work that needs to be done to document, research, write, curate and speak about art from “othered” communities also coincides with the dismantling of the beginning portion of the training “pipeline.”32 Decolonizing art history demands advocacy, for complacency or defeatism will only precipitate the field’s demise. Reactionary attempts to return the discipline to the realm of elites and the privileged few are akin to the presidential executive order signed by Donald Trump in 2020 to impose neoclassical architectural styles on US government buildings. How is it that during its most significant moment of reckoning, art history is somehow perceived as unconnected to the present moment and disposable as an academic field of study? Art history can and must “constitute itself as a locus of radical critique.”33 Our contributors model how, offering approaches and methods imbued with criticality and projecting infinite hope—to borrow from Martin Luther King Jr.—for decolonial futures. While it is true that the discipline is burdened by its colonial underpinnings and compromised by its dependence on wealthy benefactors, anyone who tries to argue that art history is irrelevant and superfluous has not been paying attention. Many of the most powerful and visible acts of protest in the recent past have been staged around monuments and museums, as Eddie 9

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Chambers and Nelson Maldonado-Torres discuss in this volume. In an image-saturated world, visual literacy is a fundamental skill. Images communicate across multiple registers. They are both immediate and direct, capable of affecting us viscerally or emotionally, but also operate in subtle ways that are not readily apparent to a casual viewer. Works of art and objects of visual culture have the potential to make us question established frameworks but may also reinforce them. The art history classroom is the place to analyze the relation between image-making (and breaking) and ideology.34 Decoding visual c­ ommunication— modeled by author Fernando Luiz Lara through his attentive analysis of maps and architectural plans—makes evident the relation between spatial representation and territorial control.35 Built environment establishes a particular dialogue with place that is crucial to understanding ecological degradation over a longue durée, as the work of Tamara Sears makes evident. The manner that colonial structures displace and render invisible autochthonous knowledge systems requires focused study and radical empathy, approaches exemplified by contributors Yve Chavez and Genevieve Hyacinthe. No other discipline attends with such care to how materials and forms converge to make meaning, as Andrew James Hamilton meticulously lays out in his chapter. Unlike other humanistic disciplines, art history has a long-standing public-facing component as the training ground for museum professionals and curators. Exhibitions must communicate with multiple audiences, including people with disabilities, specialists, and children. A decolonizing approach to art history builds on the attributes of the discipline and looks to other models to forge necessary new directions. The work of this volume is urgent, its intellectual and ethical stakes high. Because decolonizing art history presents a specific set of obstacles, it is a particularly useful exercise that has the potential to inform other areas of inquiry. But what does it mean to decolonize a discipline? For one, it entails thinking beyond disciplinary boundaries and even embracing the “undisciplinary.”36 It also requires dispensing with the “foundational fictions” that structure its logic, or, in the case of art history, “the epistemic assumptions” of European superiority “established in the Western world since the European Renaissance and through the European Enlightenment.”37 These mythologies have resulted in “the massive silencing of the past on a world scale [and] the systematic erasure of continuous and deep-felt encounters that have marked human history throughout the world.”38 A decolonizing approach is not simply an exercise of inclusion based on factors such as geography, temporality, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and many others. It requires a radical rethinking of concepts, values, and attitudes we take for granted, making visible heterogeneous forms of being and doing and their capacity to materialize alternate worlds. To borrow the directives put forward by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln in the introduction to the volume Handbook of Critical Methodologies and Indigenous Inquiry, It must be ethical, performative, healing, transformative, … and participatory. It must be committed to dialogue, community, self-determination, and cultural autonomy. It must meet people’s perceived needs. It must resist efforts to confine inquiry to a single paradigm or interpretive strategy. It must be unruly, disruptive, critical, and dedicated to the goals of justice and equity.39 This volume draws attention to the work of artists, art historians, curators, activists, educators, and scholars in related fields who have been engaging with disrupting master narratives and forging new directions, often within a hostile academy or an indifferent art world. As Deborah Hutton notes in this volume, “many art historians are doing this work.”40 Long 10

Introduction

before critiques of colonialism became integrated into traditional humanistic c­ urricula, art historians of the non-West had been acutely aware of the temporal and geographic discrepancies in what they were expected to teach (2,000 years of art in Asia, for example) and what their Europeanist colleagues were (quattrocento Florence). As Hutton argues, art history as a discipline “repeatedly centers and reaffirms the category of Western art and creates an underlying narrative working against the many changes we as individual scholars and teachers are trying to make.”41 Even “the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism,” as Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith has written.42 Walter Mignolo discusses the imperial nature of the language in use today, most of which is derived from Greek and Latin, and notes that “the words/concepts you use in your discipline and even in everyday conversation were translated and redefined around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe.”43 This holds true for both “art” and “history.” Contributor Carolyn Dean has already called attention to “the trouble with (the term) art.” Underscoring the fact that “what is today called art was not made as art,” she notes that “naming art elsewhere cannot help but reinforce European aesthetic supremacy.”44 “Aesthetics” is perhaps an even more problematic term, inseparable from Enlightenment philosophy, yet used in decolonial studies as a subcategory (i.e. Decolonial Aesthetics), either for lack of alternatives or because this vocabulary is so deeply ingrained as to become naturalized.45 “History” also presupposes a host of assumptions, including the idea, as noted by art historian Keith Moxey, “that the events in the past make sense” or the belief in a “purposive or teleological development.”46 Edgardo Lander ponders the consequences of doing away with this Hegelian model of universal history: The implications for non-Western societies and for subaltern and excluded subjects around the world would be quite different if colonialism, imperialism, racism, and sexism were thought of not as regretful by-products of modern Europe, but as part of the conditions that made the modern West possible.47 Indeed, one of the fundamental ruptures demanded by a decolonial framework is discarding the myth of modernity, which “is neither an entity nor an ontological historical period, but a set of self-serving narratives.”48 Michel-Rolph Trouillot asserts that “modernity disguises and misconstrues the many Others that it creates” and “always requires an other and an Elsewhere.”49 As Lander argues, We could assume a different perspective on the so-called crisis of the subject if we were to conclude that the extermination of natives, transatlantic slavery, and the subordination and exclusion of the other were nothing more than the other face, the necessary mirror of the self, the indispensable contrasting condition for the construction of modern identities.50 Decolonizing art history seeks modes of writing history otherwise, “away from the sovereign and authoritative,” as contributor Ana María Reyes writes. Chicana theorist Emma Pérez has proposed “a decolonial imaginary as a rupturing space, the alternative to that which is written in history.”51 She continues, The decolonial imaginary is intangible to many because it acts much like a shadow in the dark. It survives as a faint outline gliding against a wall or an object. The shadow 11

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is the figure between the subject and the object on which it is cast, moving and breathing through an inbetween space.52 Pérez’s characterization of how elusive this space is makes clear that a decolonizing approach might challenge preconceptions of “academic rigor” or the “historian’s craft”; may involve creative license to speculate, reinvent, and reimagine; and may eschew purported neutrality by being openly political and explicitly motivated. Reflecting on her research on enslaved women, Saidiya Hartman recognizes how the present informs our writing of the past and guides us towards liberated futures: A history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past, and to imagine a free state, not as the time before captivity or slavery, but rather as the anticipated future of this writing.53 She acknowledges a frustration that may sound familiar to those of us who have been doing the work of decolonizing art history over our entire careers: The history of black counter-historical projects is one of failure, precisely because these accounts have never been able to install themselves as history, but rather are insurgent, disruptive narratives that are marginalized and derailed before they ever gain a footing.54 Our contributors approach the task of decolonizing art history from many angles, ranging from art practice as a form of activism against staid art historical frames or archival absences, as narrated by contributors Ken Gonzales-Day, Celeste Pedri-Spade, and George Mahashe, to testimonials, dialogues, case studies, and methodological interventions. The essays collected here were written under extremely challenging circumstances. Many of our contributors worked through losses, illnesses, and crises, and others whom we invited could simply not deliver because of extenuating circumstances. To them and to our readers, we are deeply grateful. Decolonizing art history is admittedly an intellectual project that will not restore land to Native communities. It has already resulted, however, in the repatriation of objects, the staging of difficult conversations, a long-awaited disciplinary self-examination across many spaces, and the promise of a more just and ethically grounded field. As our collective work gains momentum, mistakes, differences of opinion, and controversial positions should not deter us because the efforts undertaken here are made in good faith. Given that art history has long been a tool of colonialism, we consider the action of “decolonizing” the appropriate approach. We embrace this term in the manner it was used by bell hooks in 1992, a year commemorating a charged anniversary: “We decolonize our minds and our imaginations.”55 In the sections that follow—Being and Doing, Learning and Listening, Sensing and Seeing, and Living and Loving—our contributors embark on this very project.

12

Introduction

Being and Doing “It is knowledge itself that must be rewritten,” declared Sylvia Wynter in 1990.56 She was addressing the State of California Board of Education to advocate against the adoption of a “multicultural” textbook that instead of addressing historical wrongs perpetuated misconceptions. She buttressed her argument with a long quotation by British biologist Sir Stafford Beer: Contemporary scholarship is trapped in its present organization of knowledge […] in which, while papers increase exponentially and knowledge grows by “infinitesimals,” our understanding of the world “actually recedes.” And because our world is an “interacting system” in dynamic change, our system of scholarship is “rooted in” its own sanctified categories, is, in a large part, unavailing to the needs of mankind. If we are to “understand a new and still evolving world, if we are to educate people to live in that world, if we are to abandon categories and institutions that belong to a vanquished world as well is nigh desperate that we should … then knowledge itself should be rewritten.57 Wynter’s intervention dismounts many of the founding myths of the United States, especially its descriptor of being “a nation of immigrants.” She counters that view—which implies these immigrants are “generically White”—through statements such as this: This conception of the nation, by its very definition, must ontologically erase the existence of the indigenous inhabitants of the continent, as well as of the other founding population group who had come, not as immigrants in search of freedom, but as slaves in chains.58 This critique is potently brought to life by Mexican-born Afro-Zapotec-Mixtec poet Alan Pelaez Lopez in “The Pledge of Allegiance,” which makes evident how the modern nationstate defines citizenship according to a select community (Figure 0.3). As a queer Black and Indigenous Mexican who came to the United States as an unaccompanied undocumented minor, Pelaez has experienced exclusion on many registers.

Figure 0.3  Alan Pelaez Lopez, “The Pledge of Allegiance,” poem published in Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien (2020). Courtesy of the author.

Wynter points to the erasure of Blackness and Indigeneity that constitutes the dominant framework for conceiving of US national identity as propelling “the massive error about the founding categories of Americas,” an “error [that] produces cognitive distortions.”59 Many academic disciplines are founded on just such racist or ethnocentric assumptions, but abandoning familiar “categories and institutions” as Beer proposes is no easy feat. The 13

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alternative under the current neoliberal world order would likely bring about more invisibility and absence.60 How, then, to rewrite knowledge? One place to begin is by correcting the “cognitive distortions” that coloniality brings about. Throughout her writings, Wynter pointed, as did many other anticolonial thinkers, to the divide between self and other that elevated Europeans and their descendants and denigrated everyone else, a condition pithily encapsulated by the phrase “the West and the rest.”61 The discipline of art history has historically been premised on the assumption of European superiority, and the abandonment of Eurocentrism needs to be the first order of business. In his seminal 1955 treatise “Discourse on Colonialism,” Martinican writer Aimé Césaire avowed, “Europe is indefensible.”62 His powerful text turns the tables on the socalled humanistic values that are at the core of European intellectual identity—its sense of self or Being. Invoking the familiar dichotomy of civilization and savagery that has been used to justify colonization, he argued the opposite: that colonialism is antithetical to civilization and that it is fundamentally inhuman(e): Between colonization and civilization there is an infinite distance, that out of all the colonial expeditions that have been undertaken, out of all the colonial statutes that have been drawn up, out of all the memoranda that have been dispatched by all the ministries, there could not come a single human value.63 Césaire decried the hypocrisy of Enlightenment philosophy and its ideas on liberty and “the rights of man,” writing “its concept of those rights have been—and still is—narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased, and, all things considered, sordidly racist.”64 He went on to condemn the complicity of those who live under a colonial regime and turn a blind eye to its atrocities: What am I driving at? At this idea that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.65 In this excoriation of the West, Césaire painted the citizens of colonizer nations as collaborators. Deeply discomfiting, his text calls for accountability and self-examination. Following in the footsteps of Wynter, Césaire, and others, who repeatedly made the argument that the colonized other is a precondition for the conception of the modern European self, Nelson Maldonado-Torres observed, “The very relationship between colonizer and colonized provided a new model to understand the relationship between the soul or mind and the body; and likewise, modern articulations of the mind/body are used as models to conceive the colonizer/colonized relation.”66 If Being became the purview of European philosophy and humanity the exclusive domain of Europeans, MaldonadoTorres defined the “coloniality of Being” as “those aspects that produce exception from the order of Being,” describing “[i]nvisibility and dehumanization” as its “primary expressions.”67 Sylvia Wynter used the term “Man” to characterize the European conception of the human, “coming to invent, label, and institutionalize the indigenous peoples of the Americas as well as the transported enslaved Black Africans as the physical referent of the projected irrational/subrational Human Other to its civic-humanist, rational 14

Introduction

self-conception.”68 This point is crucial and cannot be overstated: coloniality brought to the fore “the issue of the genre of the human.”69 An art history that engages in decolonial work acknowledges, following Wynter, the overrepresentation of Man as “the generic, ostensibly supracultural human” in relation to “subjugated Human Others” and examines its own complicity in perpetuating the coloniality of being.70 What to do to counteract a worldview that is fundamentally unjust, unethical, and immoral? Inspired by Frantz Fanon’s groundbreaking 1967 volume Black Skins, White Masks, Maldonado-Torres offers a decolonial option of Being and Doing against their Eurocentric foreclosures. Quoting from Fanon’s conclusion, he cites the Caribbean author’s rejection of the binary of superior versus inferior and his ensuing suggestion: “Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?”71 Fanon’s solution calls for the abandonment of a hierarchy that produces the atomized individual in favor of radical empathy: sensing, listening to, and ultimately loving the other. MaldonadoTorres coins the neologism des-gener-acción, or de-gender-action, to underscore the move from being to doing. By invoking gender, he acknowledges that decolonial work is inherently anti-patriarchal.72 As he advocates, A consistent response to coloniality involves both decolonization and ‘des-generacción’ as projects, both of which are necessary for the YOU to emerge. Only in this way the trans-ontological can shine through the ontological, and love, ethics, and justice can take the role that the non-ethics of war have occupied in modern life.73 For Maldonado-Torres, decolonization “is a gift itself, an invitation to engage in dialogue.”74 Ugandan decolonial feminist Sylvia Tamale observes that the concepts of decolonization and decoloniality “connot[e] an active action of undoing or reversal” through the “de-” prefix.75 Acknowledging that the colonial processes that impacted the African continent had irreversible consequences and that these inherited systems are all pervasive, she proposes that Africans move beyond the “de-” to embrace a more dynamic form of doing: “the agenda for decolonization and decolonial activism must involve re-constructions that focus on […] reclaiming our humanity; rebuilding our territorial and bodily integrity; reasserting our self-determination; restoring our spirituality,” among others.76 These strategies resonate with how Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s described her own rebellion against inherited cultural and social impositions: She reinterprets history and, using new symbols, she shapes new myths. She adopts new perspectives toward the darkskinned, women and queers. She strengthens her tolerance (and intolerance) for ambiguity. She is willing to share, to make herself vulnerable to foreign ways of seeing and thinking. She surrenders all notions of safety, of the familiar. Deconstruct, construct. She becomes a nahual, able to transform herself into a tree, a coyote, into another person. She learns to transform the small “I” into the total Self.77 In both examples, women who have been victims of colonization write themselves, rather than being written about. The conundrum of representation—articulated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous question, “Can the subaltern speak?”—finds a resolution under the decolonial.78 The answer is, of course, yes, once the conditions are in place. When this comes to pass, the interlocutor should step aside, either by accepting a supporting role or moving to another topic. A decolonizing approach to art history recognizes when it is time for others to have the floor and supports efforts to multiply and amplify these voices. 15

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Sarah Ahmed’s concept of the willful subject, exemplified by Anzaldúa and others, serves as a model of both being and doing that is simultaneously decolonial and queer. The will, one of the central yet elusive topics of Enlightenment philosophy, has been at the core of Eurocentric idealized conceptions of Being. Willfulness implies a perversion of the ideal. Ahmed defines it thusly: “asserting or disposed to assert one’s own will against persuasion, instruction, or command; governed by will without regards to reason; determined to take one’s own way; obstinately self-willed or perverse.”79 According to the terms of this definition, willfulness subverts a standard of behavior that aligns with patriarchy, heteronormativity, coloniality, and white supremacy. Ahmed describes the willful subject in terms of negation: willfulness as a judgment tends to fall on those who are not compelled by the reasoning of others. Willfulness might be what we do when we are judged as being not, as not meeting the criteria for being human, for instance. Not to meet the criteria for human is often attached to other nots, not human as not being: not being white, not being male, not being straight, not being able-bodied. Not being in coming up against being can transform being.80 Willful subjects are those who do not know their place in a colonial framework and who do not accept their subjecthood under the coloniality of being. If the will is a “straightening device,” willful subjects are inherently deviant.81 Later, Ahmed describes them as wanderers: When you stray from the official paths, you create desire lines, marks on the earth, as traces of where you and others have been. A willfulness archive is premised on hope: the hope that those who wander away from the paths they are supposed to follow leave their footprints behind.82 The work of painter Firelei Báez is rife with willful subjects. Figures with female attributes painted in motley colors rebelliously parade over maps and blueprints to demonstrate that they do not conform to impositions of gender, race, class, and coloniality. Untitled (­Anacaona) (2020) pays homage to a Taino woman cacique from the Caribbean island of Ayiti/Kiskeya (renamed Hispaniola by Columbus), who is revered as a martyr by presentday Haitians and Dominicans (Figure 0.4). Báez superimposes an abstracted portrait of Anacaona, who was murdered by Spanish colonists in 1503, over a British map of the region. In reference to her death by hanging, she is represented through the attributes of a rope. A form that is braided and decorated with abstract patterns coils around the visual field. On one end, the designs appear to start unraveling into loosely woven ribbons that become tighter, transforming back into braids, which then become organic white forms that appear to simultaneously reference loose hair, wings, and fur. On the other side, the serpentine figure morphs into leaves over the location occupied by Haiti. Winding over the surface of the map, Anacaona’s body extends over the colonized Caribbean as a symbol of resistance and hope. In the spirit of Ahmed’s “willfulness archive,” this volume is a compilation of texts conceived in a decolonial vein that carve out new ways of doing art history—perhaps obstinately, combatively, assertively, queerly, courageously, atypically—in the hopes of propelling the discipline towards just, ethical, anti-racist futures. Concerning themselves with essences, selfhood, identities, representation, and more, the essays in Being and Doing tackle 16

Introduction

Figure 0.4  Firelei Báez, Untitled (Anacaona), 2020.  Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas, 96 3/8 × 127 3/8 in. (244.6  × 323.5  cm). Collection of the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

the challenge of rewriting knowledge. The section opens with Eddie Chambers’s powerful call to action, “Writing Art History in the Age of Black Lives Matter,” which lays out the stakes and evinces the urgency of this volume by proposing a methodology of research and writing that is genuine, credible, and ongoing in its struggle against systemic racism. In Chapter 2, Māori art historian Ngarino Ellis offers new Indigenous ways of thinking about objects of visual and material culture in “Being an Indigenous Art Historian in the 21st Century.” In “Reinvention at the Wheel,” Amanda Cachia presents sustained consideration of the interdisciplinary artistic practice of Black disabled contemporary US artist Shawanda Corbett, who draws from speculative fiction to dissolve distinctions of gender, race, and able-bodiedness. Chapter 4 features an interview titled “The Power of Absence” between volume editor Tatiana Flores and queer Latinx photographer Ken Gonzales-Day, in which the two address erasure and absence, concentrating on the invisibility of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx experiences in the visual-cultural record. In the following chapter, “Art in Paradise Found and Lost,” LeGrace Benson considers how an approach that accounts for the local ecosystem affects our understanding of colonization and decolonization in the arts in Haiti, from the time of the Taino to the present day. In Chapter 6, Sandrine Colard analyzes how Congo artist Bodys Isek Kingelez used his maquette-monuments, inspired by African independence movements of the 1960s, to envision decolonial liberation through 17

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a visual critique of urban and epistemological modernism. The controversial proposal of decolonizing the Cuban Revolution is the topic of Chapter 7, by María de Lourdes Mariño Fernández, in which she proposes to look critically to the institutionalization of the 1959 Revolution through contemporary artist-led protests. In a powerful reflection on museums and colonialism, Sumaya Kassim, writing from a Muslim diasporic perspective, demonstrates how secularism, central to understandings of Western museums and their collections can be understood as a “white slate.” Akiko Walley’s contribution, “Land and See That Divide/Connect,” takes Japanese art history as a case study to problematize nationalist constructions of the discipline that depend on periodization and essentialized notions of ethnic or racial purity. In Chapter 10, volume co-editor Florencia San Martín examines failure as resistance and radical hope in the struggle against colonialism in her critical examination of Chilean-born, U.S. based artist Alfredo Jaar’s 1987 work A Logo for America. The final essay in Being and Doing, Chapter 11, is by Wendy Shaw, “Light as a Feather: The AntiCapitalist Radiance of Decolonial Art History.” Here, the author posits twelfth-century Persian poetry as a way to comprehend visual art, marshaling the figure of the mythic bird, the Simurg, as a means to center ephemerality and disrupt capitalism.

Learning and Listening Learning and Listening draws inspiration from Kaupapa Māori researchers, who, Repositioned in such a way as to no longer need to give voice to others, to empower others, to emancipate others, to refer to others as subjugated voices, […] listen and participate […] in a process that facilitates the development in people as a sense of themselves as agentic and of having an authoritative voice.83 This repositioning of the role of the researcher is crucial to developing a decolonizing art historical praxis. As Indigenous scholar of education Sandra Styres (Kanien’kehá:ka) writes, Decolonizing praxis, by its very nature, resists mainstream approaches to teaching and learning as well as challenging taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in the hidden curriculum within classroom practices. In the classroom, decolonizing praxis challenges colonial relations of power and privilege that are systemically embedded in academia.84 The essays gathered here foreground radical pedagogies that work to dismantle Western epistemologies, model new directions for the ethical (co-)creation and transmission of knowledge, and foster methodologies that center collaboration and reciprocity. The advent of European colonialism in the fifteenth century, in addition to bringing forth unspeakable violence in the form of genocide, ethnocide, and ecocide, also resulted in epistemicide, defined beyond “the destruction of knowledge,” as encompassing “the destruction of the social practices and the disqualification of the social agents that operate according to such knowledges.”85 Kenyan thinker Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o described the effects of imperialism on local knowledge systems as a “cultural bomb.” He elaborated, The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their  languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, 18

Introduction

in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves […] It even plants serious doubts about the moral rightness of struggle. Possibilities of triumph are seen as remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair, despondency and a collective death-wish.86 Commentaries such as this, along with the current backlash against critical race theory, the threats to academic freedom, and the disinvestment in public education confirm that knowledge not sanctioned by the colonizer is resistance. In a world marked by coloniality, rewriting knowledge, as Wynter exhorted, is an uphill struggle, since existing hegemonies undermine decolonizing efforts. As Mignolo explains, “knowledge requires actors and institutions, and actors and institutions conserve, expand, change the structure of knowledge but within the same matrix: the colonial matrix of power.”87 Despite violence, oppression, marginalization, erasure, and even epistemicide, knowledges endure or are born anew. In her analysis of Wynter’s thought, Katherine McKittrick points out the theorist did not begin from “categories of disenfranchisement” but, rather, reconceptualized the human as a “relational category.”88 In Wynter’s thought, Human life is marked by a racial economy of knowledge that conceals—but does not necessarily expunge—relational possibilities and the New World views of those who construct a reality that is produced outside, or pushing against, the laws of captivity.89 To think beyond the primacy of the text is fundamental. As Sylvia Tamale writes, “Given that Western knowledge systems use the indicator of the written record to separate the human eras of ‘prehistory’ and ‘history,’ it is no wonder that traditions that depend on oral wisdom are perceived as lacking history.”90 Indigenous Andean activist Miguel Palacín Quispe describes the knowledge system of his people: We have knowledge and wisdom; what happens is that we do not write or accumulate on computers and papers, we accumulate and transmit from generation to generation. That is why our knowledges are accumulated within the community itself, and there is where we practice them. Therefore, territorial rights, knowledges, and justice are practiced in a collective manner, together: we all grow or decline together.91 He characterizes this community as a locus where “reciprocity, duality, and complementarity are practiced,” in other words, as possessing a worldview contrary to Western individualism. Métis anthropologist Zoe Todd describes the frustration she experienced upon attending a lecture on the environment by theorist Bruno Latour, whom she holds in high regard, and hearing no mention of the work of Indigenous thinkers and climate activists: I waited through the whole talk, to hear the Great Latour credit Indigenous thinkers for their millennia of engagement with sentient environments, with cosmologies that enmesh people into complex relationships between themselves and all relations, and with climates and atmospheres as important points of organization and action. […] It never came.92 19

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She concludes with a critique of disciplinarity and its silencing and invisibilizing of Indigenous voices, “Because we still practice our disciplines in ways that erase Indigenous bodies within our lecture halls,” it becomes “easy for those within the Euro-Western academy to advance and consume arguments that parallel discourses in Indigenous contexts without explicitly nodding to them, or by minimally nodding to Indigenous intellectual and political players.”93 Similarly, major theorists of decolonial studies have come under attack from Indigenous thinkers for appropriating their knowledge creation and repackaging it for a Western audience. Rivera Cusicanqui famously wrote about Mignolo, “Taking up my ideas about internal colonialism and the epistemology of oral history, he regurgitated them entangled in a discourse of alterity that was profoundly depoliticized.”94 She further posited that the jargon of the decolonial school comprised of Quijano, Mignolo, Dussel, and others (such as their tendency towards neologisms) entangles and paralyzes their objects of study: the indigenous and African-descended people with whom these academics believe they are in dialogue. But they also create a new academic canon, using a world of references and counterreferences that establish hierarchies and adopt new gurus.95 Taking heed, Ramón Grosfoguel warns against “epistemic extractivism,” which he defines as “plunder[ing] ideas in order to promote and transform them into economic capital, or appropriat[ing] them into the Western academic machinery to earn symbolic capital. In both cases, this involves decontextualizing them in order to remove the radical content.”96 Xwélméxw (Stó:lō) scholar Dylan Robinson has identified a similar phenomenon from the field of sounds studies, which he terms “hungry listening.”97 As discussed by Olivia Landry, it involves “the fevered ‘consumption for knowledge resources’ [and] … participates in the conceit that more knowledge means more power.”98 Robinson characterizes decolonizing work in sound studies as “becoming no longer sure what LISTENING is.”99 Beyond taking oral traditions seriously and seeking out a multiplicity of voices, listening also entails acknowledging the limits of understanding and accepting untranslatability, unknowability, and opacity. Anthropologist Audra Simpson discusses refusal in regard to her ethnographic fieldwork among the Kahnawake. Making reference to the concept of “double consciousness,” first articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois at the turn of the twentieth century in relation to the U.S. African-American experience, the to characterize the bifurcated relationship of the colonized to the colonizer on the one hand and to their own community on the other Simpson writes, There seemed rather to be a tripleness, a quadrupleness, to consciousness and an endless play, and it went something like this: ‘I am me, I am what you think I am and I am who this person to the right of me thinks I am and you are all full of shit and then maybe I will tell you to your face.’ There was a definite core that seemed to reveal itself at the point of refusal and that refusal was arrived at, of course, at the very limit of the discourse.100 Marissa Muñoz sheds light on the power of silence in a colonial context: “If we re-orient our thinking to ask how Indigenous peoples, knowledge, and cultural practices have survived in such a contested and fraught territory, we can start to understand how silence protects.”101 20

Introduction

Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity allows for the acceptance of unknowability. Against the Western notion of transparency and its presumption of “‘understanding’ people and ideas,” which, as he argues, will always yield reduction, Glissant “demand[s] the right to opacity.”102 Opacity “is not enclosure” or impenetrability “but subsistence within an irreducible singularity.”103 It is the elimination of duality, where “every Other is a citizen and not a barbarian.”104 In its irreducibility, however, opacity calls forth dialogue, since it is “the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence.”105 As such, opacity compellingly offers itself as a decolonizing pedagogical approach: The thought of opacity distracts me from absolute truths whose guardian I might believe myself to be. Far from cornering me within futility and inactivity, by making me sensitive to the limits of every method, it relativizes every possibility of every action within me. Whether this consists of spreading overarching general ideas or hanging on to the concrete, the law of facts, the precision of details, or sacrificing some apparently less important thing in the name of efficacy, the thought of opacity saves me from unequivocal courses and irreversible choices.106 It is sad but true that thinking differently about the transmission of knowledge or what even constitutes knowledge within our globalized neoliberal present is regarded as transgressive and increasingly subject to censorship or punishment. To remain bound by the paradigms of the past, however, is to acquiesce to being a colonial subject in perpetuity. M. Jacqui Alexander finds a way out by cultivating an “oppositional consciousness” through a pedagogical praxis inspired by the Middle Passage: [P]edagogies that are derived from the Crossing fit neither easily nor neatly into those domains that have been imprisoned within modernity’s secularized episteme. Thus, they disturb and reassemble the inherited divides of Sacred and secular, the embodied and disembodied, for instance, pushing us to take seriously the dimensions of spiritual labor that make the sacred and the disembodied palpably tangible and, therefore, constitutive of the lived experience of millions of women and men in different parts of the world. […] I came to understand pedagogies in multiple ways: as something given, as in handed, revealed; as in breaking through, transgressing, disrupting, displacing, inverting inherited concepts and practices, those psychic, analytic and organizational methodologies we deploy to know what we believe we know so as to make different conversations and solidarities possible; as both epistemic and ontological project bound to our beingness.107 We couple these profound ideas with bell hooks’s inspirational words on teaching: Urging all of us to open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions, I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom.108 Learning and Listening begins with a multi-author conversation on decolonizing arts and educational institutions, inspired by the creation of the Ohketeau Cultural Center in rural 21

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Massachusetts, USA. Entitled “Where’s Decolonization?,” interlocutors include Rhonda Anderson and Larry Spotted Crow Mann, with Jonathan P. Eburne, Stacy Klein, and Carlos Uriona. In Chapter 13, “Overcoming Art History’s Meta-Narrative,” art historian Deborah Hutton posits specific actions to move art history beyond Eurocentrism, the latter deeply embedded in the basic structure of the discipline, as witnessed by encyclopedic museums, survey texts, and college curricula. Ananda Cohen-Aponte outlines a plan to decolonize art education centered on K-12 education for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) youth, one that promotes radical collaboration, in her contribution “Pathways to Art History: Pedagogy, Research, and Praxis through a Decolonial Lens.” In Chapter 15, artist Keg de Souza offers deep listening and storytelling as models of decolonial pedagogy through a discussion of her 2016 installation, Redfern School of Displacement, created on the unceded land of the Gadigal people of Eora nation (otherwise known as Sydney, Australia). In Chapter 16, Claire Raymond focuses on the problem of adjunct labor in academia as a site of capitalist exploitation, sexism, and racism through her own experiences teaching art history at the college level and in conversation with photographic practices that are critical of violent colonial labor systems. In “Decolonial Cinematic Flows: Histories, Movements, Confluences,” Dalida María Benfield, drawing from the Third Cinema movement and its global legacies, elaborates on the plurality (instead of duality) of early twenty-first-century decolonial media cinema, video, and other audio-visual technologies. “Re-Indigenizing Ancient Mexican Glyphic Codices,” by Felicia Rhapsody Lopez, takes to heart Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s call to decolonize research on Indigenous communities in her study of glyphic conventions in pre-contact Mesoamerican pictorial codices, examining them as Native forms of written language. As a non-Indigenous scholar working on queer performance genealogies among the Māori and Pasifika communities in Aotearoa, New Zealand, Amelia Jones proposes allowing oneself to become destabilized as a means of decolonizing such research. In Chapter 20, photographer and scholar Roshini Kempadoo’s “Afterlives/Futurelives: Imagining Mermaids and Recalling Ghost Dancing” analyzes various authors and artists from the Caribbean whose work envisions new futures in the wake of the slow violence and territorial occupation of colonialism. Writing from a California Indian perspective, in Chapter 21, Yve Chavez offers Indigenous epistemologies that concentrate ecological knowledge as means of re-interpreting Spanish-Indian missions located in California and elsewhere in the southwest US, forcing a reckoning with these sites as centers of forced conversion and other forms of colonial violence. The final essay by Jane Chin Davidson ponders the ways art history can forge new hopeful paths toward decolonial dreams and practices through an overview of specific eco-art, earth art, and environmental performance practices since the 1970s.

Sensing and Seeing Sensing and Seeing challenges the circumscribed parameters of visuality in art history and proposes that for a decolonial project we must deconstruct vision while centering other ways of beholding, strategies of spectatorship, and multi-sensorial approaches. These include methods derived from practices outside the West or frameworks inspired by gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, visual and material culture studies, disability studies, phenomenology, affect theory, and more. Based on his research on Yorùbá cultures, Africanist art historian Henry Drewal has proposed the term “sensiotics” to account for “the crucial role of the senses in the formation of material forms, persons, cultures, and histories, with a focus on bodily knowledge in the creative process as well as in reception by 22

Introduction

body-minds.”109 Considering that in Western culture considerations of sight are ­inextricably shaped by language, he positions sensing as central for understanding our environments, writing, While language … is one of the ways we re-present the world, before language we began by perceiving, reasoning, theorizing, and understanding through all our senses. Sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, motion, and suprasensory perception continually participate, though we may often be unconscious of them, in the ways we literally make sense of the world.110 Despite, or maybe because of, the frenetic proliferation of images at this current moment of global neoliberalism, questioning sight as a cornerstone of art history is fundamental to a decolonizing approach. Vision and the gaze are constructed to privilege whiteness, masculinity, and abled-bodiedness. Ocularcentrism is central both to disciplinary art historical practice and to the Western philosophical tradition more broadly.111 The essays gathered here propose ways of thinking about vision and the senses that eschew Eurocentrism, in some cases, grappling with the fallacy of considering sight as the sole strategy for apprehending the world and interpreting its visual and material cultural production. While art history as a discipline was created in nineteenth-century Europe, its roots lie in the early modern era, and the study of Italian Renaissance art has been central to its conception.112 Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550/1568), a compilation of biographies of the leading artists active in Northern Italy from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, is a key reference. A mainstay of the field, it became a model for art history as an evolutionary narrative, the mystification of the artist as a person of extraordinary talent, and the creation of narrow and exclusionary artistic canons that project themselves as aesthetic universals.113 These traits are still prevalent in art historical writing, exhibition making, and the art market. The Renaissance, hailed historically as a great efflorescence of Western culture, was ­coterminous with the European invasion of the Americas, as decolonial theorists remind us. Nelson Maldonado-Torres describes colonialism’s consequences as a “metaphysical catastrophe,” given that it created and perpetuated the notion—which would become orthodoxy—that only some people were worthy of being considered human at all.114 ­ Deemed inherently and irredeemably inferior and stripped of their homes, culture, and self-determination, the victims of European colonization were, therefore, just fit to be enslaved, exploited, abused, or killed. In other words, the historical period that traditional art ­history championed as the apogee of human achievement was for the colonized a hellscape of v­ iolence, disease, mass murder, and enslavement—the beginnings of their “permanent struggle against death.”115 A bedrock of decolonial theory is the argument that the two conditions are intertwined—that European pretensions of superiority depend on the subjugation and othering of colonized peoples and their descendants. In his 2013 performance Punto di Fuga (Vanishing Point), Cuban performance artist Carlos Martiel made explicit the relation between European ocularcentric aesthetics and domination, or, to put it more bluntly, the ways in which art and art history’s construction of whiteness goes hand in hand with the dehumanization of Black people (Figure 0.5). In this durational piece, Martiel foregrounds the technique of one-point perspective—a pictorial method of spatial organization, codified by Leon Battista Alberti in his 1435 treatise On Painting and considered a key achievement of the Italian Renaissance, to achieve the 23

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Figure 0.5  Carlos Martiel, Punto di Fuga, 2013.  Nitsch Museum, Naples, Italy. Photo by Amedeo Bestante. Courtesy of the artist.

24

Introduction

illusion of three-dimensionality. The artist is trapped by the system of orthogonals materialized as black threads that penetrate and appear to traverse his body. Projected from a wall in front of him, they converge on a single point, or vanishing point, known in Italian as punto di fuga, literally, the point of escape. Of course, the irony is that for too long there was no escape from the monocular vision of European aesthetics, which only considered its own achievements as worthy of praise and study. In its conceptualization and methods, art history upheld the Eurocentric view of the Renaissance as a period that was both culminating and inaugural, in the process masking the violence of its epistemic claims. Heinrich Wölfflin claimed in his foundational text Principles of Art History (1905) that stylistic differences, the description of which became a disciplinary building block, emerged from the “peculiarities of national imagination,” present in “the very blood” of its citizens.116 In other words, artistic style was conceived of as deriving from and expressing inherent, biological, and essentialized notions of race. Early considerations of Latin American art as colorful, bombastic, and overly political may be taken as code words for stereotypes about the people themselves.117 The same holds true for the framing of Orientalism in West Asia and Northern Africa, and the label “primitive” to describe art works from traditional cultures in Africa, the Americas, and Oceania.118 Scholars of race have theorized the act of looking, not as a neutral physiological operation but as an embodied white practice. George Yancy argues, “White gazing is a violent process. It is not an atomic act or an inaugural event that captures, in an unmediated fashion, the bareness, as it were, of ‘objects.’” 119 Gazing, then, is a strategy that enacts white power and asserts the spectator’s superiority over others it denigrates or dehumanizes. In response, Yancy proposes “unsuturing” as a corrective—a conscious undoing or taking apart of whiteness through a steadfast commitment to antiracism. Sociologist Joe Feagin’s notion of the “white racial frame,” a largely imperceptible power structure which he traces to settler colonialism in the Americas, demonstrates the challenges of conceiving the world differently.120 He argues that the lived experience and sense of reality of white people in the United States and much of the West is tied to a “dominant frame.”121 This white racial frame functions “as an overarching white worldview that encompasses a broad and persisting set of racial stereotypes, prejudices, ideologies, images, interpretations and narratives, emotions, and reactions to language accents, as well as racialized inclinations to discriminate.”122 As legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris, author of the groundbreaking article “Whiteness as Property,” previously observed, In ways so embedded that it is rarely apparent, the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white have become a valuable asset that whites sought to protect and that those who passed sought to attain—by fraud if necessary.123 Currently, debates as to the origins of whiteness and who may be included in its designation abound. Interrogations of race and racism across Latin America, for example, are often dismissed as imposing US American concerns over other contexts.124 Natalia Molina, who advocates for thinking of race as a “relational concept,” argues that while “whiteness may be a created identity, it has real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige, and opportunity.”125 Whiteness controls discourse, promoting its world view as universal, centering its achievements while silencing others, and imposing standards that benefit its own ways 25

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of thinking and doing.126 Ralph Ellison wrote in his 1952 novel Invisible Man, an icon of African-American literature, These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them you’re lying, they’ll tell the world even if you prove you’re telling the truth. Because it’s the kind of lie they want to hear.127 Another major contribution in Invisible Man is Ellison’s foregrounding of visibility and invisibility, a crucial dynamic that affects many marginalized and racialized groups. The book, which is narrated in the first person by a Black protagonist who goes unnamed, famously begins: I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus side shows, it is as though I am surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.128 Indeed, invisibility goes hand in hand with hypervisibility, and it impacts all social groups. In relation to the dominant culture, Maureen Reddy posits, Whiteness and heterosexuality seem invisible, transparent, to those who are white and/or heterosexual; they are simply norms. In contrast, whiteness makes itself hypervisible to those who are not white, much as heterosexuality forces itself upon the consciousness of … [those who do not identify as such]. And one way these constructs reinforce the invisibility to those who benefit from them is precisely through this hypervisibility to those who do not.129 Education scholar McKinley Jones Brayboy (Lumbee), writing about Native Americans studying in elite universities, posits, “American Indian students are both visible and invisible on such campuses in ways that contribute to their marginalization, oppression, and surveillance.”130 Afro-Jewish philosopher Lewis R. Gordon identifies five different kinds of invisibility: “(1) racial, (2) indigenous, (3) gendered, (4) exoticized, and (5) epistemic.”131 For the first he writes, “Racial invisibility involves not being seen as a human being by virtue of hyper-visibility—a state of being perceived excessively because of not belonging.”132 Examples like these elucidate the connection between vision and visuality and racism. According to visual studies scholar Nicole R. Fleetwood, “the black body always troubles the visual field.”133 Art history has been without a doubt complicit in the (re)production of whiteness. A European discipline, it was created to analyze European objects or artifacts defined as “art” using tools presented as objective, to valorize and single out cultural products of Europeans and their descendants as superior, all while pretending to uncover universal truths. Art historian Carolyn Dean, in her groundbreaking article, “The Trouble with (the Term) Art,” has observed that “the discipline of art history all too often has, through many of 26

Introduction

its European epistemological technologies, reinforced what are in fact colonialist perspectives, judgments, and rationales.”134 Feminist art historian Amelia Jones points out that the “normative subject” of Western art is a “straight, white, upper-middle-class male … coincident with the category ‘artist’ in Western culture.”135 Against the purportedly disinterested viewer and the argument that beauty is universal—pillars of Western aesthetics beginning with Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790)—Jones argues that performance and body art as well as other forms of self-representation by women and artists of color “have the potential to achieve certain radically dislocating effects.”136 Fabiola Jean-Louis’s extraordinary photographic portrait Madame Beauvoir’s Painting (2016) is a case in point (Figure 0.6). It portrays a Black woman painter before an easel. Wearing an elegant dress with a prominent bustle, she is outfitted in the manner of a fashionable European noblewoman of the nineteenth century. Her painting in progress is based on a photograph of an enslaved man named Gordon, whose back was scarred from whippings. The “scourged back” image, as it was called at the time, circulated in the United States during the Civil War (1861–1865) to draw attention to the abolitionist cause. JeanLouis’s version is rendered in color and contains elements of Western abstraction, such as a triangle superimposed over the subject’s ear, white paint drippings, and a treatment of the maimed back in white and red to recall American action painting à la Jackson Pollock. The painter’s own dress is “decorated” with a similar pattern, a dissonant detail that draws attention to how European wealth and luxury culture was wrought from the labor of enslaved peoples.137 This powerful image brings to life Jones’s observation on body art as destabilizing: The more exaggeratedly narcissistic and particularized this body is—that is, the more it surfaces and even exaggerates its nonuniversality in relation to its audience—the more strongly it has the potential to challenge the assumption of normativity built into modernist models of artistic evaluation, which rely on the body of the artist (embodied as male) yet veil this body to ensure the claim that the artist/genius ‘transcends’ his body through creative production.138 Interdisclipinary scholarship has been crucial to generating novel approaches to artworks that undermine vision, whether to critique it or to center the other senses. Theorizing from the intersection of Black and queer studies, Stephen Best suggests that contemporary artworks model nonspatialized ways of thinking, an aesthetics of adjacency, perspective, and the untransmissible.139 In a reading of a signature work by contemporary Ghanaian artist El Anatsui, Versatility (2006), a glittering, sculptural wall hanging crafted of recycled materials, Best focuses his attention on the artwork’s surface, with its reflective, shifting, unfixable effects, which he analogizes to the intransmissability of history. He introduces another conceptual tool in his reading of artist Mark Bradford, the notion of immurement or a walling off of meaning. Crafted from layers of collage and paint, parts of which the artist then sands away, Bradford’s works leave the viewer with glimpses of past images and words. Best’s reading suggests that a stable, defined meaning is ever elusive.140 Our consideration of seeing, while inspired by the history of Western art itself and the entrenched legacies of its analytical tools, is also motivated by the role of imagery in the present. Transfemininst Sayak Valencia notes the “exacerbated proliferation of images” of this hyper-consumerist moment.141 Informed by decolonial theory and paraphrasing ­Quijano, Valencia analyzes the intertwining of “the colonial gaze,” that is “the coloniality 27

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Figure 0.6  Fabiola Jean-Louis, Madame Beauvoir’s Painting, 2016, from the Rewriting History series. Archival pigment print, 24 x 31 in. (61 x 78.7 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

of seeing,” evident from the fifteenth to twenty-first centuries.142 At this moment of visual proliferation, we experience “body-colonizing affects and effects,” with roots in the “(neo) colonialism” of sight.143 These observations align with W. J. T. Mitchell’s characterization 28

Introduction

of visual culture studies as encompassing “the visual construction of the social, not just the social construction of vision.”144 Materiality studies, understood as encompassing both objects of material culture and investigation into the actual materiality of works of art, offers promising new directions for moving beyond the visual to embrace embodiment and engage the other senses. Dating back to the 1990s, scholars of the material turn in the humanities began to expand the types of objects under analysis, shifting away from the over-valuation of textual sources to consider objects on their own, as material documents that constitute their own archive. Objects produce meaning differently than texts, deviating from linear interpretive paths to more affective realms. Art history’s restricted attention to painting, sculpture, and architecture at the expense of other media and its narrow focus on visuality, however, have been a hindrance for the field. Art historian Michael Yonan acknowledges that “Art history has tended to suppress its status as material culture even as it has flirted continuously with materiality, and this has evolved into a serious intellectual limitation.”145 As art historian Jennifer Van Horn writes, Objects matter […]. Their materiality; the formal qualities of color and texture and properties of paint, paper, and wood; the overall composition, massing, and organization of forms—each of these factors leaves traces through which the actions of past creators and users can be recovered. Objects are physical things, but they are also things to think with, things that, through their very material presence, simultaneously encapsulate multiple symbols and capture varying resonances.146 Material objects offer more inclusive ways to think about the historical past, especially for cultures destroyed and people displaced by colonial violence. They invoke affect, emotion, our sense of touch, taste, and smell. Material culture studies thus shifted our interpretive paths to include more than vision—to touch and other embodied means of knowing. Interrogating the centrality of vision in art history invariably leads to the realization that the discipline is premised on ableism. Georgina Kleege, a scholar of English and disability studies who is legally blind, writes, When theorists imagine a spectrum of human visual experience they place the blind man at one end, standing for the complete absence of vision. The other endpoint is occupied not by a person with merely average vision, but by the artist, someone understood to possess extra special vision.147 Abolitionist educator Talila L. Lewis makes the connection between disability and coloniality, through an evolving definition of “ableism.” In its 2022 variant, the definition reads: A system of assigning value to people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in eugenics, anti-Blackness, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. This systemic oppression leads to people and society determining people’s value based on their culture, age, language, appearance, religion, birth or living place, “health/ wellness,” and/or their ability to satisfactorily re/produce, “excel” and “behave.” You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism.148 29

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The COVID-19 pandemic certainly pushed disability to the forefront of the conversation, and this is fast becoming a central concern for decolonizing approaches across the humanities. Tobin Siebers, a professor of English and advocate known for having theorized “disability aesthetics,” posited that “disability operates both as a critical framework for questioning aesthetic presuppositions in the history of art and as a value in its own right important to future conceptions of what art is.”149 Countering “the symbolic exclusion of disability by society,” Sieber made an appeal to the disability community. To intervene vigorously in culture wars, wherever they may be found, creating artworks, performance, theater, and political spectacle, imprinting disabled bodies and minds on the public landscape, and inventing new modes of beauty that attack aesthetic and political standards that insist on uniformity, balance, hygiene, and formal integrity.150 Artist Constantina Zavitsanos offers an inspiring direction, discussing how their process involves a broad understanding of sensing—as feeling, as limit, as togetherness, as love: Like most people, I really feel things, including those often deemed immaterial. And I double down on that commonly held resource of feeling, materially. I work at the limits of what constitutes matter and capacity, to interfere in what perceivably must be accessed through fixed form or a given sense. I sculpt things like inaudible sound waves or holographic transmissions that slip from view—simultaneously producing endless repetition and static demonstration, or disappearing altogether. […] Revealing the materiality of the perceived limits of the audible, sighted, light, lays bare that that which has been deemed universal is a mere contingency. Our incapacity insists we make together at the limits of capacity, in favor of a means beyond measure—at the limit of the possible—and toward an ever impossible and wholly real love.151 Considerations of the sensate are also central to developments in affect theory, which lead us from seeing to sensing as a mode of understanding. This discussion of sensing challenges Eurocentric notions of the primacy of the visual and of seeing, to move into the realm of affect, emotions, and the senses—other ways of knowing. It also shifts from the valorization of humans, as conceived of by Renaissance thought, to consider the environment, nonhuman animals, and more-than-human ways of apprehending, perceiving, and being. It expands beyond univocal conceptions of truth or rationality, European concepts presented as universalizing, to recognize other ways of being and doing. Leticia Alvarado, building on queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, centers the importance of affect for building community.152 Employing affect undercuts essentialized constructions of identity. It also opens the door to utopianism, to envisioning more just futures. These are important strategies at this particular moment, as Valencia suggests in her theorization of the present moment as one of “gore capitalism.” Reacting to escalating global violence, the commodification of violence, the rise of right-wing governments, and the loss of human and non-human rights around the world—all expressions of how violence has become capitalism’s “new commodity,” Valencia also notes another key trait of gore capitalism: its ability to discourage us from being able to imagine the future.153

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The essays in this section engage with these and other theoretical strands and envision new, more just futures—confronting art history’s ghosts, recognizing the importance of non-Western ways of comprehending, centering sensing, and affective engagements as modes of viewing—all in the service of decolonizing art history and our world. In the words of Angela Davis, “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”154 Sensing and Seeing opens with “Spooky Art History (or, Whatever Happened to the Postcolonial?)” by Kajri Jain, an important theoretical intervention that contends with the specters of history, art history, and colonialism and considers the fate of postcolonialism. In Chapter 24, architectural historian Fernando Luiz Lara analyzes spatial abstraction as an index of coloniality, pondering how architectural practice may be decolonized through an acceptance of relational knowledges and participatory processes. In “Dishumanizing Art History?” Inka art specialist Carolyn Dean decenters anthropocentrism, including Western insistence on the primacy of sight, to argue that human exceptionalism hinders efforts to decolonizing knowledge. In Chapter 26, Pamela Nguyen Corey moves beyond seeing to listening as a means to access knowledge in “The Digital Voice as Postcolonial Proxy,” considering speech, voice, and text as historical and posthuman presence in the art of British-Singaporean artist Erika Tan. In “Whiteness and the Decolonial,” curator and art historian Alpesh Patel embarks on making whiteness “strange,” through his approach to two contemporary artists from Poland, Jacek J. Kolasiński and Radek Szlaga. Elena FitzPatrick Sifford moves back to colonial Latin America in Chapter 28 to suggest minor transnationalism as a way to decenter imperial presence, thereby shifting our focus to artistic exchange on the margins, between Black and Indigenous makers and viewers. In “The Imperial Landscape of Eighteenth-Century A ­ nglo-Indian Portraiture,” Zirwat Chowdhury examines portraits as proxies of the colonized landscape. Andrew James Hamilton queries the subtexts of such art historical descriptives as “abstract” and “geometric” and suggests employing Indigenous categories to think about Inca art in “Unseeing Art History.” Performance study scholar Hentyle Yapp’s contribution shifts us from seeing to feeling in order to perceive an aesthetic of disability in “Debility and the Ethics of Proximity: Spatial and Temporal Immediacy in the Work of Candice Lin.” In “Decolonizing Crocodiles, Repatriating Birds: Human-Animal Relations in the Historical Indian Landscape,” Tamara Sears turns to non-human animals and precolonial sources to bring to light colonial ideas and their legacy today, including the failure of conservation in the postcolonial nation. “‘We are so many bodies, my friends’: Countervisiblity as Resurgent Tactics,” by Sarita Echavez See, rounds out this section. Departing from the US colonization of the Philippines in the early twentieth century, the author suggests countervisibility as a strategy to (re)contextualize artists’ engagements with histories of colonialism.

Living and Loving “Love has been our survival,” Audre Lorde commented, regarding her experience as a Black lesbian writer.155 For thinkers who model decolonial praxis, love is a feeling, epistemology, and attitude of defiance against the strictures of patriarchy, coloniality, and whiteness. In a similar vein, bell hooks wrote the following dedication in her 1992 book of essays Black Looks: I dedicate this book to all of us who love blackness, who dare to create in our daily lives

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spaces of reconciliation and forgiveness where we let go of past hurt, fear, shame and hold each other close. […] Holding each other close across differences, beyond conflict, through change, is an act of resistance.156 From these perspectives, loving as a form of living and living as a form of loving contest the injustices and oppression the current neoliberal world order of power imposes and perpetuates in the name of salvation, progress, and reason. Through a decolonial lens, love does not operate through the colonial logic that “sees human beings as inferior or superior racially, by gender, class, ability, or other categories, to other humans [and] also sees humanxs as superior to the rest of the natural world.”157 This means that decolonial love, as Chicana scholar Chela Sandoval contends, exists “as a set of practices and procedures that can transit all citizen-subjects, regardless of social class, toward a differential mode of consciousness and its accompanying technologies of method and social movement.”158 As a way of living, sensing, thinking, and relating within oneself and the collective, in solidarity, love, as Denzin and Lincoln maintain, operates as “an essential ingredient of a just society … [and] a political principle through which we struggle to create mutually life-enhancing opportunities for all people.”159 In this sense, not only does decolonial love “involv[e] a radical acceptance that […] allows us to see others for what they are” as Terry Eagleton has argued,160 it also offers “a tool of constant struggle that fosters the subversion of the practices of exploitation and cultural appropriation violently inflicted by colonialism,” as Indigenous author Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) writes in Islands of Decolonial Love.161 In her 1987 novel Beloved, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison explained the importance of self-love in the face of overwhelming intergenerational violence and its ensuing trauma through the voice of one of the characters, Baby Suggs, who was born into slavery: “Here,” she said, “in this place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They do not love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick ’em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And o my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them.162 Many scholars, artists, writers, activists, educators, feminists, and community organizers have foregrounded love as decolonial method, conceiving living and loving together as an inextricable bond forged through solidarity, care, acceptance, and validation of self and others, and as a mode of resistance. As bell hooks asserted, “as we work to be loving, to create a culture that celebrates life, that makes love possible, we move against dehumanization, against domination.”163 Her words recall Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire’s promotion of teaching as a decolonial mode of liberation, specifically when it relates to the capacity of the oppressed to regain their sense of humanity thus overcoming their condition as, in Fanon’s terms, “the wretched of the earth.”164 Freire maintained that the struggle for liberation “will actually constitute an act of love opposing the lovelessness 32

Introduction

which lies at the heart of the oppressors’ violence.”165 Writing from the 1960s through his death in the late 1990s, he argued for the indissoluble relationship between liberation, education, revolution, and love: “It is impossible to teach without the courage to love, without the courage to try a thousand times before giving in. In short, it is impossible to teach without a forged, intended, and well-thought-out capacity to love.”166 Advocating for the revolutionary power of teaching as an act of love and thus of liberation conducted through humility as a means of overcoming fear, Freire, as explicated by scholar of education Antonia Darder, maintained that “Through dialogue and solidarity, teachers and … students can discover new ways to contend with conflicts and differences in the interest of creating greater instances of democratic life, within schools and communities.”167 In contrast to debate, or the articulation of oppositional viewpoints where the purpose is for one side to win, Freire called for dialogue, and he considered solidarity to be its essential ingredient. As Darder explains, “antidialogical underpinnings of … anti-solidarity are central to the ethos of neoliberal (in)sensibilities.”168 Dialogue, on the other hand, [i]s a collaborative phenomenon, with an underlying purpose of building community through participants who focus communally on critical engagements of similar, differing, and contradictory perspectives, in order to discover ways to understand the world together and forge collective social action in the interest of democratic life.169 In her chapter in this volume, Ana María Reyes brings Freire’s influential book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) to bear on decolonial love through examples of artistic practice premised on solidarity, collectivity, pedagogy, and dialogue from which “we can learn about the decolonizing possibilities of dialogical art in co-creating non-hierarchical power relations and new ways of being in the world.”170 Other contributors to this volume, such as Keg de Souza or Fernando Luiz Lara, also engage with Freire’s pedagogy of justice, reciprocity, humility, and empathy. Their contributions are included in other sections, however, unearthing the fluidity of concepts and methods this volume presents. Indeed, as the essays included here show, not only are recognition of the other (or seeing and sensing) and radical pedagogies of liberation and politics of reception (or learning and listening) produced through decolonial living and loving, so is decolonial consciousness (or being and doing). As Sandoval argues, love “can access and guide our theoretical and political ‘movidas’—revolutionary maneuvers toward decolonized beings.”171 Living and Loving thus interweaves with other sections in this book and vice versa, building relational pluriversalities that resist hegemonic structures of domination. Still, as a political principle from which to create, remember, imagine, and facilitate mutually life-enhancing options, Living and Loving encompasses specific senses, behaviors, and emotions such as, for instance, joy. As Dominican-American literary scholar Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo writes, We must fold […] small acts of love and creativity and play (and laughter and irreverence and whimsy) into […] resistant projects against white supremacy because the goal of white supremacy is precisely to deny black people joy, laughter, whimsy, and play.172 An act of love and creativity that emancipates desires and foregrounds decolonial modes of contestation for Black people, joy opens the possibility of rebellion to other arenas and 33

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in so doing challenges the binary oppositions of our neoliberal modernity. And because decolonization is about breaking with dominant practices and resisting subordination in all its forms, the presence of joy as a form of love in representational and discursive projects of resistance is key. Other possibilities of dissent and tools for liberation in pasts, presents, and futures, such as reciprocity, mutual awareness of well-being, and cooperation, have likewise been negated by coloniality, which has instead favored individuality as a measure of human success. Decolonial loving as a way of living, on the other hand, is an intersectional and reciprocal knot that acknowledges what is dismissed by our colonial, patriarchal, racist, sexist, and capitalist institutions, propelling horizontal modes of care for the other. As such, love exists in relations of mutual respect that take place in social manners of living, instead of relations of submission and domination. As biologist Humberto Maturana and psychologist Gerda Verden-Zöller wrote, “Cooperation is a consensual activity that arises in a domain of mutual acceptance in a cooperation that is invited, not demanded. The basic grounding emotion or mood in cooperation is love.”173 From a decolonial perspective, cooperation as a component of relational love encompasses human and non-human life. It regards us and our ancestors, as well as the Earth, air, waters, mountains, trees, and all beings, as a totality that we surround and that surround us, together. Indeed, as Anishinaabe scholar Damien Lee has argued, for Indigenous peoples, the notion of returning home and thus the concept of land and thus of water, of community, is key for “resurgences and decolonization” as well as “the source of Indigenous knowledges, identities, languages, nationalisms, songs, and laws.”174 As such, it encompasses the “understanding [of] how energy or spirit within place operates,” that is, the understanding of land and belonging as a key component of the decolonial heart.175 As WSANEC and Pacheedaht artist Keisha Jones notes, When I think about love and connection I think about how I feel at home when I’m out on the land and out on the water and out in the community in that area; it’s just a huge part of love for me. It’s home.176 For Indigenous people, keeping home and the sense of belonging as palpitating returns in the living experience means resistance to coloniality. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson maintains that it is “the intense love of land, of family, and of our [Indigenous] nations that has always been the spine of Indigenous resistance.”177 Land as place and sense of belonging has also motivated decolonial resistance in peoples who have been displaced, forced to migrate, or even persecuted or killed for trespassing newly drawn borders. Such is the case of Palestinians in their current condition of territorial dispossession. The painting Yaffa (1979) by Sliman Mansour images Palestine as a site of living and loving and projects hope for an otherwise future (Figure 0.7). Picturing a woman in an orange grove carrying a basket of fruit on her back, she is part of a community of mostly women, who are depicted as being in complete harmony with their surroundings. Dressed in long embroidered dresses, their heads covered with veils, the women convey collective care and love for their land. Composed as extensions of the trees, they are portrayed as keepers of ancestral memory. The protagonist, with eyes wide open and an upright posture, projects joy, calm, and strength. That the load she carries is not a burden suggests that neither she nor the land is being exploited. Creating equilibrium between the individual and the collective as well as humans and their environment, the painting evokes the relationship between 34

Introduction

Figure 0.7  Sliman Mansour, Yaffa, 1979. Oil on canvas, 47 1/4 x 55 1/8 in. (120 x 140 cm). ­Courtesy of the artist.

care, hope, land, and resistance through the perpetuation of agricultural traditions. Curator Tina Sherwell, who included the work in the 2019 exhibition Intimate Terrains: Representations of a Disappearing Landscape at the Palestinian Museum in the West Bank, observes, The depiction of landscape over the decades provides us with a prism onto the experience of loss and longing, a prominent subject matter for artists, as its topography holds a central place in Palestinian identity formation. Landscape is at once both a vast site of projection and a deeply layered terrain of remains, memories, and histories.178 35

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As decolonial love is entangled with cooperation, reciprocity, and other manifestations of communal care, mainstream rights of living are also reframed, specifically modernity’s logic of “human rights.” Exploring the limitations of only considering human social rights, Mignolo proposes instead communal living rights, which encompass all life on the planet. As he writes, It is obvious that what are being violated are not only “human rights” but the “rights to life,” which are threatened by climate change and the alteration of the environments (e.g., via forest fires engineered to promote agribusiness and building construction) of communities living in and from the land, the ocean, and the rivers. At this juncture, immigration, humanitarian interventions, the exploitation of “natural resources” … and the commodification of food and water are consequences of the logic of capital accumulation and the dispensability of life.179 His provocation challenges the individual as the governing unit of Western civilization and the separation of humans from nature and the cosmos.180 Indeed, cultivating decolonial love as reciprocity and communal well-being strengthens not only a commitment to challenging our neoliberal system that creates poverty and destroys the environment, it also reinforces humility, a key imperative in decolonizing art history. Together, these ideas about living and loving ask the question: How can we humbly live in mutual and ethical care, respect, and cooperation while at the same time inhabiting a world that denies reciprocity through rational justification of aggression and war? Antonia Darder and Luis F. Mirón put it this way: “How much suffering must we witness before we finally remove the blinders of complacency and embrace a truly revolutionary love—a love linked to a struggle grounded in a shared kinship, political self-determination, and economic justice?”181 Essays in this section elaborate on decolonial living and loving within artistic practices, methods, and discourses ignored by the arrogance of colonial research, which, as Anishinaabe scholar Kathleen Absolon has argued, favors “voyeurism, outsider interpretation, objectification of culture and reductionist analysis.”182 “Living and Loving” addresses reciprocity, cooperation, well-being, mutual awareness, and belonging, as well as joy, solidarities, queerness, ecologies, memory, dialogue, self-expression, and family and community ties. Together, they model decolonial modes of living and loving for art history, so as to imagine, experience, struggle, and/or remember otherwise. Opening this section, Charmaine A. Nelson focuses on clothing as resistance through the story of Dutchess, an enslaved woman living in St. Vincent in the eighteenth century. In the following chapter, Rebecca M. Brown ponders in “Rina Banerjee’s Decolonial Ecologies” how the process of art making gives life to new, decolonial worlds. Anishinabekwewag photographer Celeste Pedri-Spade discusses her use of historical Anishinaabe photographs in her artistic practice, modeling ways to work with Indigenous communities through collaboration, protocols of respect, and relational accountability in “The Teaching is in the Making: A Relational and Embodied Experience of Anishinaabe Photographs.” In Chapter 37, Roland Betancourt, writing from his perspective as a queer Latinx scholar of Byzantine art, suggests ways to decolonize the study of the Middle Ages. Mapuche artist Sebastian Calfuqueo explores the right of living in reciprocity in “The Waters Surrounding Wallmapu, the Waters Surrounding Life.” In the following chapter, “Dialogical Episodes for Decolonizing (Art) History,” Ana María Reyes models strategies to decenter colonial power through relationality and dialogic viewing. Through an analysis of embodied fluidity and oceanic flows in the work of two Black Caribbean women artists in Chapter 40, 36

Introduction

“Inner Spaces: The Depth Imagination,” environmental humanities scholar Elizabeth DeLoughrey foregrounds how ecocritical methods, such as wet ontologies and critical ocean studies, collapse boundaries between humans and nature and force a reconsideration of media itself. In “Maria Auxiliadora da Silva: Nossa Mãe Maria of Terreiro Life and Faith on Black Grounds,” Genevieve Hyacinthe models her approach of “loving ethnography” and argues for artistic creation as a space of liberation and joy through her research on AfroBrazilian artist Maria Auxiliadora da Silva (1935–1974). In Chapter 42, Gigi OtálvaroHormillosa examines Afro-Caribbean performance artist Michael Richards (1963–2001), a sculptor who employed haptic imagery to explore Indigenous and Black alliances and oscillated between centering the visibility and invisibility of Blackness. Anuradha Gobin’s essay, “­Bittersweet Histories and Tarnished Gold” questions silences about histories of the transatlantic slave trade in museums and other cultural institutions through her excavation of the visual culture of Dutch Brazil and its afterlives. In the final chapter of Living and L ­ oving, George Mashashe critically situates his own photographic practice in relation to the colonial archive of South Africa. Lastly, in the Afterword, decolonial theorist and activist Nelson Maldonado-Torres urges us to push beyond decolonizing as a theoretical construct to actively make change in the world. How can we as individuals and collectively create a more just world? Answering that question is the goal of this volume.

Notes Allow us to open our Introduction with a land acknowledgement, a necessary first step in a volume on decolonizing art history. Tatiana Flores: The land on which Rutgers University, my academic home during the writing of this volume, stands is the ancestral territory of the Lenape People. We pay respect to Indigenous people throughout the Lenape diaspora—past, present, and future—and honor those who have been historically and systemically disenfranchised. We also acknowledge that Rutgers University, like New Jersey and the United States as a nation, was founded upon the exclusions and erasures of Indigenous peoples. In addition, Rutgers was built with the labor of enslaved people and founded by men who were slaveholders. Rutgers’ grim history of enslavement is available on the university’s Scarlet and Black Digital Archive (https://scarletandblack.rutgers.edu/), which also sheds light on the broader history of slavery in New Jersey. We keep in our minds and hearts the victims of the Transatlantic slave trade and of contemporary atrocities. Florencia San Martin: My academic affiliation is with Lehigh University, which resides on Lenapehoking, the traditional home of the Lenni Lenape. Earlier work for this volume was completed when I served on the faculty of California State University, San Bernardino, located on territory and ancestral land of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians (Yuhaaviatam). Charlene Villasenor Black writes from the University of California, Los Angeles, located on unceded Gabrielino/Tongva land. UCLA acknowledges the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar (the Los Angeles basin and South Channel Islands). As a land grant institution, we pay our respects to the Honuukvetam (Ancestors), ‘Ahiihirom (Elders) and ‘Eyoohiinkem (our relatives/relations) past, present and emerging. As a collective, we extend our deep gratitude to Julian Wong-Nelson, our research assistant. We also thank Alejandra Lopez-Oliveros, who provided important support. 1 Cited in Ramón Grosfoguel, “World-Systems Analysis in the Context of Transmodernity, Border Thinking, and Global Coloniality,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) vol. 29, no. 2 (2006): 172. 2 See Eddie Chambers, “Destigmatizing Art History,” Art Journal vol. 81, no. 4 (2022): 5–7. 3 Eric Hanson, Daniel P. Games, and Alexa Manuel, “The Residential School System,” Indigenous Foundations, https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/residential-school-system-2020/.

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Tatiana Flores et al. 4 Calls for repatriation of looted art, other forms of cultural heritage, and human remains are key issues currently facing museums. For an article on the repatriation of Benin bronzes by a museum in the United Kingdom that lays out some key debates, see Associated Press, “UK Museums Agrees to Return Looted Benin Bronzes to Nigeria,” VOA, August 8, 2022, https://www.voanews.com/a/ uk-museum-agrees-to-return-looted-benin-bronzes-to-nigeria-/6691446.html. For a deep study, see Bénédicte Savoy, Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat, trans. Susanne Meyer-Abich (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022). 5 On protests against museums during the COVID-19 pandemic, see Aaron Randle, “‘We Were Tired of Asking’: Why Open Letters Have Become Many Activists’ Tool of Choice for Exposing Racism at Museums,” Artnet News, July 15, 2020, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/­museum-openletters-activism-1894150, and Shirley Li, “American Museums Are Going Through an Identity Crisis,” The Atlantic, November 28, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/11/ american-museums-are-going-through-identity-crisis/617221/, and the Strike MoMA movement (https://www.strikemoma.org/). 6 Enrique Dussel, “Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism,” Nepantla: Views from the South, vol. 1, no. 3 (2000): 470. 7 See Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from the South vol. 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–580; Nelson, Maldonado-Torres, “Colonialism, ­Neocolonial, Internal Colonialism, the Postcolonial, Coloniality, and Decoloniality,” in Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui, and Marisa Belausteguigoitia, eds. Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 67–78; and Arturo Escobar, “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin America Modernity/Coloniality Research Program,” Cultural Studies vol. 21, nos. 2–3 (March/May 2007): 179–210. For a critique of Quijano and his circle from an Indigenous Andean perspective, see Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa. Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2013), 66–68. For the English translation, see Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa: On Practices and Discourses of Decolonization, trans. Molly Geidel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020). 8 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post-continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique—An Introduction,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World vol. 1, no. 2 (2011): 5. 9 Sarita Echavez See, The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); and Guisela LaTorre, Walls of Empowerment: Chicana/o Indigenist Murals of California (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008). 10 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society vol. 1, no. 1 (2012): 5, 7. 11 Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 12 See La Tanya S. Autry, “A Black Curator Imagines Otherwise,” Hyperallergic, April 22, 2021, https://hyperallergic.com/639570/a-black-curator-imagines-otherwise-latanya-autry/, and Sumaya Kassim, “The Museum Will Not Be Decolonised,” Media Diversified, November 15, 2017, https://mediadiversified.org/2017/11/15/the-museum-will-not-be-decolonised/. 13 Rivera Cusanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa. Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores, 5, 19. Translation by Charlene Villaseñor Black. 14 Laura E. Pérez, Eros Ideologies. Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2019), preface, unpaginated. See, as well, Charlene Villaseñor Black, “Aesthetics, History, and the Crisis of Meaning,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture vol. 2, no. 2 (July 2020): 4–11. 15 Néstor García Canclini, Art Beyond Itself: Anthropology for a Society without a Story Line, trans. David Frye (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 10. 16 García Canclini, Art Beyond Itself, 16. 17 Sayak Valencia, “Políticas visuales del transfeminismo y la pospornografía,” in Cristina Isabel Castellano González and María Candelaria Ochoa, eds., Feminismos visuales (Guanajuato: Centro Universitario de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, 2018), 141. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 141–142.

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Introduction 20 LaTanya S. Autry and Mike Murawski founded the Museums Are Not Neutral movement and hashtag in 2017 to “[e]xpose the myth of museum neutrality and demand ethics-based transformation across institutions.” See https://www.museumsarenotneutral.com/. 21 On the erosion of academic freedom in the US, see Ellen Schreker, “The 50-Year War on Higher Education,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 14, 2022, https://www.chronicle.com/ article/the-50-year-war-on-higher-education. On whether teaching counts as protected speech under U.S. law, see Francie Diep, “It’s Not Clear Whether Public-College Professors Have First Amendment Rights When They’re Teaching,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 26, 2022, https://www.chronicle.com/article/its-not-clear-whether-public-college-professors-havefirst-amendment-rights-when-theyre-teaching. 22 See Daniel Golden, “Muzzled by DeSantis, Critical Race Theory Professors Cancel Courses or Modify Their Teaching,” ProPublica, January 3, 2023, https://www.propublica.org/article/ desantis-critical-race-theory-florida-college-professors. 23 Jacey Fortin, “Critical Race Theory: A Brief History,” New York Times, November 8, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-critical-race-theory.html 24 Audra Wilson, “Attacks on Critical Race Theory Undermine Advocacy for Racial and Economic Justice,” Shriver Center on Poverty and Law, https://www.povertylaw.org/article/ attacks-on-critical-race-theory-undermine-advocacy-for-racial-and-economic-justice// 25 On affirmative action, see The Editors of Encyclopaedia Brittanica, “affirmative action,” Encyclopedia Britannica, July 14, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/topic/affirmative-action. 26 Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 18. 27 Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 3. 28 See Nathan M. Greenfield, “In the Image Era, Why Is Art History Being Squeezed?,” University World News, December 17, 2021, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story= 20211217111143231 29 The Material Collective, “An Open Letter to CAA,” July 7, 2021, https://thematerialcollective. org/open-letter-to-caa/. 30 “CAA’s Resources to Combat Departmental Closures in Art and Art History Departments,” CAA News, July 9, 2021, https://www.collegeart.org/news/2021/07/09/caas-resources-to-combatdepartmental-closures-in-art-and-art-history-departments/. 31 Erin Bartram, “A Profession, If You Can Keep It,” Contingent Magazine, January 7, 2023, https:// contingentmagazine.org/2023/01/07/a-profession-if-you-can-keep-it/ 32 Lara M. Evans, Comment, July 13, 2021, https://thematerialcollective.org/open-letter-to-caa/# comments 33 Charlene Villaseñor Black and Tim Barringer, “Decolonizing Art and Empire,” Art Bulletin vol. 104, no. 1 (March 2022): 11. 34 Notable texts on iconoclasm include Finbarr Barry Flood, “Idol-Breaking as Image-Making in the ‘Islamic State,’” Religion and Society vol. 7, no. 1 (September 2016): 116–138; Ömür Harmansah, “ISIS, Heritage, and the Spectacles of Destruction in the Global Media,” Near Eastern Archaeology vol. 78, no. 3 (2015): 170–177; Z. S. Strother, “‘Breaking Juju,’ Breaking Trade: Museums and the Culture of Iconoclasm in Southern Nigeria,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vols. 67–68 (2016/2017): 21–41. 35 See Fernando Luiz Lara, “Abstraction Is a Privilege,” Platform, June 7, 2021, https://www.platformspace.net/home/abstraction-is-a-privilege, and Fernando Luiz Lara and Felipe Hernández, eds., Spatial Concepts for Decolonizing the Americas (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022). 36 Walter D. Mignolo, “What Does It Mean to Decolonize?” in Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, eds., On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2018), 106. 37 Ibid. The phrase “foundational fictions” refers to Doris Sommer’s important study on nineteenth-century Latin American literature and nation building. See Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).

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Tatiana Flores et al. 38 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “North Atlantic Universals: Analytical Fictions, 1492–1945,” The South Atlantic Quarterly vol. 101, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 846. 39 Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, “Introduction: Critical Methodologies and Indigenous Inquiry,” in Norman K Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, eds., Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2008), SAGE Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483385686, 3. 40 Deborah Hutton, “Overcoming Art History’s Meta-Narrative,” in Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martín and Charlene Villaseñor Black, eds., The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (New York and London: Routledge, 2023), 198. 41 Ibid. 42 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People (London: Zed Books, 1999), 1. 43 Mignolo, “What Does It Mean to Decolonize?”, 113. 44 Carolyn Dean, “The Trouble with (the Term) Art,” Art Journal 65, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 25, 30. 45 TDI + Transnational Decolonial Institute [Alanna Lockward, Rolando Vázquez, Teresa María Díaz Nerio, Marina Grzinic, Tanja Ostojic, Dalida María Benfield, Raúl Moarquech FerreraBalanquet, Pedro Lasch, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, Miguel Rojas Sotelo, Walter Mignolo], “Decolonial Aesthetics (I),” May 22, 2011, https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics. 46 Keith Moxey, The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox and Power in Art History (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 10. 47 Edgardo Lander, “Eurocentrism and Colonialism in Latin American Social Thought,” Nepantla: Views from the South vol. 1, no. 3 (2000): 525. 48 Mignolo, “What Does It Mean to Decolonize?” 110. 49 Trouillot, “North Atlantic Universals,” 848, 850. 50 Lander, “Eurocentrism and Colonialism in Latin American Social Thought,” 525. 51 Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 6. 52 Ibid. 53 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 vol. 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 4. 54 Ibid., 13. 55 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 178. 56 Sylvia Wynter, Do Not Call Us Negroes: How ‘Multicultural’ Textbooks Perpetuate Racism (San Francisco, CA: Aspire Books, 1992), 22. As outlined in Appendix I, the text was written in 1990 and submitted to the State Board of Education by the California Curriculum Development and Supplemental Materials Commission to oppose the adoption of a new social science textbook for secondary school students (97–109). 57 Quoted in ibid., 22–23. 58 Ibid., 8. 59 Ibid. 60 A counterpoint must be acknowledged here, voiced by educator and curriculum specialist Jairo I. Fúnez, whose Twitter feed is an invaluable resource on decolonial thought and praxis: “Believing that we can decolonize knowledge, curriculum, pedagogy, & research without having to dismantle modern/colonial governance structures (power) is one hell of a pipe dream. Territorial sovereignty & autonomy must be at the center of all discussions of decolonization.” Jairo Fúnez, Twitter, August 17, 2022, 9:24 AM, https://twitter.com/Jairo_I_Funez/status/1559893890810912770. 61 See, for example, Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (London: Penguin Books, 2011). Another common expression is the West and its others, such as in Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, eds., Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View (Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 42 and Silvia Federici, ed., Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and its “Others” (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995). 62 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 32. 63 Ibid., 34. 64 Ibid., 37.

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Introduction 65 Ibid., 39. 66 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions on the Development of a Concept,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2007): 245. 67 Ibid., 257. 68 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review vol. 3, no. 3 (2003): 281–282. Later in the text, she differentiates between Man 1 (homo politicus) and Man 2 (homo oeconomicus) according to historical moments. 69 Ibid., 288. 70 Ibid. 71 Quoted in Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” 260. 72 See María Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Hypatia vol. 22, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 186–209 and “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia vol. 25, no  4. (Fall 2010): 742–759. For a critique of Lugones from a Black studies perspective, see ­Selamawit D. Terrefe, “The Pornotrope of Decolonial Feminism,” Critical Philosophy or Race vol. 8, no. 1–2 (2020): 134–164. 73 Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” 260. 74 Ibid., 261. 75 Sylvia Tamale, Decolonization and Afro-Feminism (Ottawa: Daraja Press, 2020), 20. 76 Ibid., 21. 77 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 104–105. 78 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence G ­ rossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. 79 Quoted in Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 4. 80 Ibid., 15. 81 Ibid., 7. 82 Ibid., 21. 83 Russell Bishop, “Freeing Ourselves from Neo-Colonial Domination in Research: A Māori Approach to Creating Knowledge,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education vol. 11 (1998): 199–219. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/095183998236674, quoted in Denzin and Lincoln, 18. 84 Sandra Styres, “Literacies of Land: Decolonizing Narratives, Storying, and Literature,” in Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang, eds., Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 32. 85 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 153. 86 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey; Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, and Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1986), 3. 87 Walter Mignolo, “Part 2: Key Concepts,” interviewed by Alvina Hoffmann, E-International Relations, January 21, 2017, accessed December 20, 2022, https://www.e-ir.info/2017/01/21/ interview-walter-mignolopart-2-key-concepts/. 88 Katherine McKittrick, “Yours in the Intellectual Struggle: Sylvia Wynter and the Realization of the Living,” in Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 8. 89 Ibid. 90 Tamale, Decolonization and Afro-Feminism, 7. 91 Miguel Palacín Quispe, “Prólogo: estamos construyendo nuevos paradigmas,”in Fernando Huancauni Mamani, ed., Buen Vivir/Vivir Bien. Filosofía, políticas, estrategias y experiencias regionales andinas (Lima: Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indigenas - CAOI, 2010), 9. Translation by Tatiana Flores. 92 Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology vol. 29, no. 1 (March 2016): 6–7.

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Tatiana Flores et al. 93 Ibid., 8. 94 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Chixinakax Utxiwa: A Reflection on The Practices and Discourses of Decolonization,” The South Atlantic Quarterly vol. 111, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 102. 95 Ibid. 96 Ramón Grosfoguel, “Epistemic Extractivism: A Dialogue with Alberto Acosta, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,” in Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Maria Paula Meneses, eds., Knowledges Born in the Struggle: Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South (New York: Routledge 2020), 208. 97 See Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 98 Olivia Landry, A Decolonizing Ear: Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2023), 10. 99 Robinson, Hungry Listening, 47, quoted in ibid. 100 Audra Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal,” Junctures vol. 9 (December 2007): 74. 101 Marissa Muñoz, “River as Lifeblood, River as Border,” in Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, eds., Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View (New York: Routledge, 2019), 77. 102 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 189–90. 103 Ibid., 190. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid., 192. 106 Ibid. 107 M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of the Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 20, 22. 108 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 12. 109 Henry John Drewal, “Sensiotics, or the Study of the Senses in Material Culture and History in Africa and Beyond,” in Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter, eds., The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 275. 110 Ibid., 277. 111 See Katarina Rukavina, “‘Ocularcentrism’ or the Privilege of Sight in Western Culture: The Analysis of the Concept in Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern Thought,” Filozofska Istrazivanja vol. 32, no. 3 (January 2013): 539–556, and Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Hal Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1984), 4–23. 112 See Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 87–105, 215–230, 232–250; Lionel Grossman, “Jacob Burkhardt as Art Historian,” ­Oxford Art Journal vol. 11, no. 1 (1988): 25–32. 113 For a discussion of Vasari’s neglect and characterization of the Hapsburg-controlled Kingdom of Naples, a cosmopolitan crossroads of the Mediterranean, as “backward” and its impact on the reception of Southern Italian art, see Aislinn Loconte, “The North Looks South: Giorgio Vasari and Early Modern Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Naples,” Art History vol. 31, no. 4 (September 2008): 438–459. 114 See Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality,” Fondation Frantz Fanon, http://fondation-frantzfanon.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/maldonadotorres_outline_of_ten_theses-10.23.16.pdf, 11–16 and “On Metaphysical Catastrophe, PostContinental Thought, and the Decolonial Turn,” in Tatiana Flores and Michelle A. S­ tephens, eds., Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (Long Beach: Museum of Latin American Art, 2017), 247. 115 For the quotation, see Maldonado-Torres, “On Metaphysical Catastrophe, Post-Continental Thought, and the Decolonial Turn,” 247. For elaboration of the idea, see Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality,” 11–16; and “On the Coloniality of Being.” 116 Heinrich Wölfflin, The Principles of Art History: The Problem of Development of Style in Later Art (New York: Dover, 1950; original in German in 1915), 106. 117 Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Beyond “The Fantastic”: Framing Identity in U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art,” Art Journal vol. 51, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 60–68.

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Introduction 118 See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) and Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, “Primitive,” in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds., Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 195–211. 119 George Yancy, “White Embodied Gazing, the Black Body as Disgust, and the Aesthetics of UnSuturing,” in Sherri Irvin, ed., Body Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 243. See, as well, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). 120 See Joe R. Feagin, The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013; orig. 2009). While Feagin’s primary object of analysis is the United States, his observations may be applied to the Western Hemisphere more broadly. 121 Ibid., 3. 122 Ibid. 123 Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review vol. 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1713. 124 See Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” Theory, Culture and Society 16, no. 1 (1999): 41–58. For a rebuttal, see John D. French, “The Missteps of Anti-Imperialist Reasons: Bourdieu, Wacquant and Hanchard’s Orpheus and Power,” Theory, Culture and Society vol. 17, no. 1 (2000): 107–128. 125 Natalia Molina, “Understanding Race as a Relational Concept,” Modern American History vol. 1, no. 1 (March 2018): 103. 126 See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “North Atlantic Universals: Analytical Fictions, 1492–1945,” South Atlantic Quarterly vol. 101, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 839–858. 127 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 142. 128 Ibid. 129 Maureen T. Reddy, “Invisibility/Hypervisibility: The Paradox of Normative Whiteness,” Transformations vol. 9, no. 2 (September 1998): 55. The original phrase read “forces itself upon the consciousness of gays and lesbians.” 130 Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, “Hiding in the Ivy: American Indian Students and Visibility in Elite Educational Settings,” Harvard Educational Review vol. 74, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 126. 131 Lewis R. Gordon, Fear of Black Consciousness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), 129. Emphasis in original. The full discussion may be found in Chapter 5, 129–146. 132 Ibid. 133 Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality and Blackness (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 12. 134 Carolyn Dean, “The Trouble with (the Term) Art,” Art Journal vol. 65, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 26, 24–32. 135 Amelia Jones, Body Art / Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 9. 136 Ibid. Emphasis in original. 137 For further reading on the artist, see Ayanna Legros, “Capturing Emancipation: Histories of the Black Atlantic in the Works of Fabiola Jean-Louis,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture vol. 3, no. 2 (April 2021): 60–64. 138 Jones, Body Art, 9. 139 Best, None Like Us, 22–23 and 59–61. 140 Ibid., 54–55. 141 Sayak Valencia, “Políticas visuales del transfeminismo y la pospornografía,” in Cristina Isabel Castellano González and María Candelaria Ochoa, eds., Feminismos visuales (Guanajuato: Centro Universitario de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, 2018), 139. Translations from the original Spanish by Charlene Villaseñor Black. 142 The original Spanish reads “el atisbo colonial” and “la colonialidad del ver,” Valencia, 140. She notes the reliance on Quijano and cites Joaquín Barriendos, “La colonialidad del ver. Visualidad, capitalismo y racismo epistemológico,” in Alex Schlenker and Edgar Vega Suriaga, eds., Desenganche. Visualidades y sonoridades otras (Quito: La Tronkal, 2010), 139–160. 143 Valencia, “Políticas visuales,” 139. 144 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture vol. 1, no. 2 (2002): 170.

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Tatiana Flores et al. 145 Michael Yonan, “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture vol. 18, no. 2 (Winter-Fall 2011): 233, http://www.west86th.bgc.bard.edu/articles/yonan.html. 146 Jennifer Van Horn, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 23. 147 Georgina Kleege, More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 2. 148 Talila L. Lewis, “Working Definition of Ableism—January 2022 Update,” https://www.talilalewis.com/blog/working-definition-of-ableism-january-2022-update 149 Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), 20. 150 Ibid., 81. 151 Constantina Zavitsanos, “Artist Statement,” Foundation for Contemporary Arts, https://www. foundationforcontemporaryarts.org/recipients/constantina-zavitsanos/. 152 Leticia Alvarado, Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2018), “Introduction. Sublime Abjection,” 1–23; and Chapter 2 “Phantom Assholes: Asco’s Affective Vortex,” 57–87. Other key sources include Melissa Greg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010; and José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs vol. 31, no. 3, New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture (2006): 675–688. 153 Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism, trans. John Pluecker (Cambridge, MA and South Pasadena: MIT Press and SemioText(e), 2018), 28. 154 Quote from a lecture at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Feburary 13, 2014, as noted at The Feminist Press: https://thefeministpress.tumblr.com/post/163104615517/you-have-to-act-asif-it-were-possible-to. 155 Audre Lorde in Mari Evans, “My Words Will be There,” in Joan Wylie Hall, ed., Conversations with Audre Lorde (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 72. 156 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), v. 157 Laura E. Pérez, Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2019), 14. 158 Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 140. 159 Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, “Introduction: Critical Methodologies and Indigenous Inquiry,” in Norman Denzin et al., eds., Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2008), 4. 160 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 131. 161 See Maria de Fátima Lopes Vieira Falcão, Gislãne Gonçalves Silva, Naiana Siqueira Galvão and Cícero da Silva, “On Modernity and the Other in Leanne Simpson’s Work, Islands of ­Decolonial Love,” Logos: Revista de lingüística, filosofía y literatura vol. 31, no. 2 (2021): 397; and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2013). 162 Quoted in Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: ­Vintage Canada, 2011), 45. 163 Ibid. 164 See Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968). 165 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York and London: Continuum, 2005), 45. 166 Quoted in Antonia Darder, Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love (New York and ­London: Routledge, 2017), 80. 167 Ibid., 93. 168 Ibid. 169 Ibid. 170 Ana María Reyes, “Dialogical Episodes for Decolonizing (Art) History,” in this volume, 504. 171 Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 141.

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Introduction 172 Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo, “Mushrooms and Mischief: On Questions of Blackness,” Small Axe vol. 23, no. 2 (July 2019): 158. 173 Humberto Maturana Romesín and Gerda Verden-Zöller, The Origin of Humanness in the ­Biology of Love, ed. Pille Bunnell (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2012), 48. 174 Damien Lee, “Placing Knowledge as Resurgence,” InTensions vol. 6 (2012): 3 175 Ibid., 9. 176 Quoted in Shantelle Moreno, “Love as Resistance: Exploring Conceptualizations of Decolonial Love in Settler States,” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal vol. 12, no. 3 (Winter 2019): 126. 177 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 9. 178 Quoted in Hadani Ditmars, “Landscape, Loss, and Palestinian Identity: Intimate Terrains,” MEI@75 | Middle East Institute (June 26, 2019), accessed January 14, 2023, https://www.mei. edu/publications/landscape-loss-and-palestinian-identity-intimate-terrains. 179 Walter D. Mignolo, “From “Human” to “Living” Rights” in The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2021), 263. 180 Ibid., 262. 181 Antonia Darder and Luis F. Mirón, “Critical Pedagogy in a Time of Uncertainty: A Call to ­Action” in Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies vol. 6, no.1 (2006): 18–19. 182 Kathleen E. Absolon, Kaandossiwin: How We Come to Know (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2011), 20.

Selected Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. Willful Subjects. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2014. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Chambers, Eddie. “Destigmatizing Art History.” Art Journal 81, no. 4 (2022): 5–7. Darden, Antonia. Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love. New York and London: Routledge, 2017. Dean, Carolyn. “The Trouble With (the Term) Art.” Art Journal 65, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 24–32. Drewal, Henry John. “Sensiotics, Or the Study of the Senses in Material Culture and History in Africa and Beyond.” In Ivan Gaskell, and Sarah Anne Carter, eds. The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, 275–294. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man, 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York and London: Continuum, 2005. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation.Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. New York and London: Routledge, 2015. Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Epistemic Extractivism: A Dialogue with Alberto Acosta, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui.” In Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Maria Paula ­Meneses, eds. Knowledges Born in the Struggle: Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South. New York and London: Routledge, 2019, 203–218. Jones, Amelia. Body Art / Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. New York: Penguin Books, 2020. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions on the Development of a Concept.” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2007): 240–270. Maturana, Humberto and Gerde Verden-Zoller. The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love. Ed. Pille Bunnell. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2012. Mignolo, Walter and Catherine E. Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2018. Muñoz, Marissa. “River as Lifeblood, River as Border: The Irreconcilable Discrepancies of Colonial Occupation From/With/On/Of the Frontera.” In Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne

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Tatiana Flores et al. Yang, eds. Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View. New York and London: Routledge, 2019, 62–81. Pelaez Lopez, Alan. Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien. The operating system KIN(D)* print//document, 2020. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. “Chixinakax Utxiwa: A Reflection on The Practices and Discourses of Decolonization.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 95–109. Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2000. Simpson, Audra. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures 9 (December 2007): 67–80. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2013. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, 1999. Tamale, Sylvia. Decolonization and Afro-Feminism. Ottawa: Daraja Press, 2020. Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey; Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, and Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1986. Todd, Zoe. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (March 2016): 4–22. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “North Atlantic Universals: Analytical Fictions, 1492–1945.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 839–858. Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. Valencia, Sayak. Gore Capitalism, trans. John Pluecker. Cambridge, MA and South Pasadena: MIT Press and SemioText(e), 2018. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

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SECTION II

Being and Doing

1 WRITING ART HISTORY IN THE AGE OF BLACK LIVES MATTER Eddie Chambers

In my “Some Concluding Considerations” of the Routledge Companion to African ­American Art History published at the end of 2019, I asked, “What does it mean to pen art history in the age of Black Lives Matter?”1 What informed my question was my belief that in writing art history and/or art criticism, context is everything. Without the art we study and teach being considered from the perspectives of multiple contexts – including social, racial, historical – it is unlikely to be sufficiently or properly understood. Art history steadfastly clings to the belief in a Western narrative of art as the only story worth telling, and that all other curricular offerings are optional embellishments. Except for those invested in social history, mainstream art historians frequently disregard context as a significant area of inquiry. When contexts like social history are raised by such art historians, the implication is that this is only necessary because aesthetics alone could not carry the narrative. But as the United States continues its unceasing war on its residents and its citizens of color, particularly African Americans, what writing can we offer that takes account of the appalling urgency of the times, locates itself within the multiple contexts of the moment, and pushes back against art history’s ingrained leanings toward conservatism? In 2021, we can perceive the extent to which the teaching and the writing of more credible art history, more commonly referred to as decolonizing the curriculum has become, in a manner of speaking, all the rage.2 The murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, in March and May 2020, respectively, while being by no means isolated outrages, nonetheless acted as a major fillip to the Black Lives Matter movement, eliciting a range of responses with which we are still coming to terms, regarding the extent of their validity or usefulness. In the wake of Taylor’s murder at the hands of Louisville police officers and Floyd’s murder, at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer and the acquiescence of his colleagues, many institutions (of culture and of learning, among others) issued statements of protest against the police violence that continues to disfigure Black humanity, and in solidarity with the victims of police brutality, by way of voicing support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Despite the apparent intensity of their declarations, the statements quickly assumed a somewhat formulaic, de rigueur character. It was almost as if scripted anti-racist protests amounted to a fashionable or impromptu custom that was, in an instant, so commonplace

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-4

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within the context of the aftermath of Taylor and Floyd’s murders that the statements were, it seems, a prescribed, mandatory part of the zeitgeist. One of the extraordinary aspects of the Taylor/Floyd-related protests was their spread or their reach. It’s a given that the protests occurred throughout the United States, but the protests also assumed a decidedly transatlantic character (more than that, of course, as people of many different ethnicities took to streets in protests that took place, from Kenya to Australia). Protests took place across swathes of Europe, including countries such as France and Scotland. It was in this highly charged and febrile context that an extraordinary event occurred in Bristol, a city in the West of England that witnessed, on 7 June 2020, its own Black Lives Matter rally. In the aftermath of the rally, a particularly animated and visionary element of the multitude took it upon themselves to tear down, with the aid of ropes, a widely despised statue of eighteenth-century Bristol slave trader, Edward Colston (Figure 1.1). Not only was the statue summarily de-plinthed, for good measure it was rolled and dragged a short distance through the center of the city, and dumped over the quay, to take its place among other detritus such as shopping trolleys and broken bicycles that city center docks, rivers and canals are frequently home to. A week later (and with Colston’s statue having been hastily retrieved from its watery grave by the city council), a text appeared on the iconoclastic art criticism website, the White Pube. The title of the piece was somewhat expletive laden – FUCK THE POLICE, FUCK THE STATE, FUCK THE TATE: RIOTS AND REFORM. Whoever the writer was, they wasted no time in voicing their protest at what they saw as formulaic and ultimately

Figure 1.1  File photo dated 7 June 2020 of protesters throwing a statue of Edward Colston into Bristol harbor during a Black Lives Matter protest rally, in memory of George Floyd who was killed on 25 May while in police custody in the US city of Minneapolis. Photograph taken by PA Photographer Ben Birchall. ©Alamy Stock Photo.

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shallow institutional responses to the urgency of the moment, even making room for a ­reference to the cataclysmic events that had taken place in Bristol, a week earlier. But I need to say this, and some of you need to hear it. Fuck these institutions, fuck these institutional players. No more gestures, no more empty words. We outnumber them, and we can just rip it out, topple it all and throw it into the nearest river.3 Clearly, what had aroused the writer’s ire was a pent-up level of frustration not only at the seemingly opportunistic and self-serving “empty words,” but equally as importantly, that institutions were enacting a well-rehearsed strategy of self-preservation, wherein supposedly progressive, empathetic statements protesting racism and other social ills were dutifully put out, particularly at moments of tension such as these. In a coordinated gesture of solidarity with Black Lives Matter, many art galleries and other cultural institutions participated in what became known as “Blackout Tuesday,” wherein, on 2 June, 2020, the Twitter feeds of these institutions suspended their regular or usual postings and posted instead, a simple rectangle, black in color. This supposedly somber, minimalist gesture was intended to underscore the sobriety of the moment, and the extent to which business as usual, in that particular point in time, was not an option. The writer of the White Pube piece was far from impressed, referring to the gesture as “bullshit hypocrisy.” The writer’s point was, in so many ways, an unarguable one. Gestures or declarations, no matter how earnest, when expressed by institutions can carry the weight of their own expendability. If gestures are not consistently, urgently, followed up by revolutionary change on the part of institutions, they rapidly assume the appearance of opportunism, selfpromotion, and self-preservation. Can there ever be a credible institution-wide response to the teaching and the writing of art history that reflects the weight and urgency of the current times? Or is decolonizing the curriculum something that is pretty much being left to individual professors? This is a fundamentally important question, the answer to which by and large determines what we look for as signifiers of progress. Make no mistake, the grievances that the writer of FUCK THE POLICE, FUCK THE STATE, FUCK THE TATE: RIOTS AND REFORM pushed back against were legitimate and well founded. As much as academia might be a less white supremacist and less Eurocentric entity than it was a decade ago (or however many decades ago one cares to go back), we must accept that the consequences (if not the explicit intentions) of institutional strategizing is that visible evidence of dramatic change for the better is fiendishly difficult to ascertain. Take for example, the matter of equal opportunities policies in academic employment. Such policies have been adopted by institutions, including of course universities, since at least as far back as the 1970s. Certainly, since the 1980s, equal opportunities policies have, year on year, been more rigorously applied/enforced, to the point that such policies are now legally mandated. And yet, in the UK, for example, if published figures are to be believed, only 155 out of 23,000 university professors are Black. Wrote journalist and editor Maddy Mussen, This [2010] is the fifth year in a row where black professors have made up less than one per cent. Only 155 out of over 23,000 university professors are black, meaning that black professors make up less than one per cent of total professorships in the UK. The figures, published annually by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, are ­unsurprising – the number of black professors has been less than one per cent for 51

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the past five years. Jo Grady, the head of [Universities and College Union], said of the figures: “The pace of change is glacial.” Halima Begum, head of the Runnymede Trust race equality thinktank, notes that these figures aren’t in line with the number of black and minority ethnic postgraduate students. “Around a quarter of British postgraduates are from ethnic minorities,” she told the BBC, “[T]here is clearly no shortage of qualified black and minority academics seeking elevation to senior teaching and research roles in our universities.”4 So, if equal opportunities policies have been in place and enforced in university human resources departments, over a number of decades, yet the figure for Black professors in the UK remains at less than 1%, then we can appreciate that year on year, the effect of the implementation of such policies is, to put it generously, negligible. To put it perhaps more harshly, such declarations of equitable treatment of suitably qualified candidates, regardless of ethnicity, racial background, etc., are worse than useless and are tantamount to the mockery of Black applicants. If universities themselves are not welcome spaces for ambitious and suitably qualified Black applicants, we need to face up to the extent to which these institutions, very simply, lack legitimacy. As noted by Richard Hylton, “from their curricula to employment practices, academe remains largely impervious and resistant to change. Is this a consequence [or indeed a manifestation] of an unspoken white privilege which continues to pervade and dominate the field of art history?”5 The employment or potential employment of Black professors is a quantifiable matter, so it’s not difficult to weigh the outcomes or the spuriousness of an institution asserting their organization’s commitment to equal opportunities and non-discriminatory procedures and practices. If over several decades such policies have not resulted in a marked increase in the percentage of Black professors, this can only mean one of two things. Either the policies are not being adequately applied (despite the implementation of mandatory recording of ethnicity and other signifiers on monitoring forms), or Black would-be professors are inherently and pathologically lesser qualified for employment than their white counterparts. The latter cannot, of course, possibly be the case. What might well be the case, however, is the presence of what Hylton describes as “a certain hostility within art history teaching towards asserting that the art world is a racially structured space.”6 Even “within what could be considered a relatively liberal and progressive art history department,” an apparently ingrained refusal to accord any validity to the historic or ongoing presence of racism was apparent to Hylton.7 It’s at this juncture that the matter of the teaching and the writing of more credible art history, or, to use the language of the moment, decolonizing the curriculum, runs into complications, or must face up to some home truths. Any academic environment in which less than 1% of faculty are Black or identify as Black clearly has colossal problems, over and above the inevitable Eurocentrism or white supremacy of its combined curricular. If Black faculty cannot gain equal access to a country’s universities despite the enforcement of equal opportunities policies, then such a problem might well define the wider academic environment, as well as conclusively signifying its dysfunctionality. But over and above a marked and tangible reluctance to embrace more substantial manifestations of diversity, academia compounds this reluctance by its clear determination to equate Black faculty with the teaching of “Black” subjects. We might, quite rightly, be struck by the extent of the synonymy between the teaching of subjects (in this case, art history) and the blunt manifestation of race in the hiring practices 52

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of universities. One of the most important points to stress here is that writing art history in the age of Black Lives Matter is most assuredly NOT a matter for Black academics alone. In this regard, it is vitally important that art history does NOT follow the dominant pathology of academia in assuming, and in many instances, insisting, that Black faculty are only there to teach “Black” subjects. We might, quite rightly, be struck by the extent of the overlap between the teaching of subjects (again, in this case, art history) and the blunt manifestation of race in the hiring practices of universities. Looking around at the art history departments across the United States with which I had varying degrees of familiarity (on account of my two terms as a caa.reviews field editor, and my term as Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal), I perceived that ­African American faculty were frequently, somewhat predictably, there to teach African American art. It was similarly apparent that African faculty were there to teach African art, Chinese academics taught Chinese art, and so on. In other words, there existed the appearance of a pronounced and decidedly unsubtle stay-in-your-laneness that was applied to art history faculty of color. When I became a field editor for caa.reviews, the online review portal of CAA, what started as an impression rapidly became a cast-iron certainty. In looking to assign books and catalogs for review, I took to the Internet, perusing the faculty pages of university art history departments across the nation or furtjerr afield, looking for people whose areas of scholarship might make them suitable for reviewing a particular book. Of course, questions of agency and choice in what led faculty to their areas of expertise and research interests are open-ended inquiries that necessarily complicate these considerations. What I mean by this is that Black faculty, such as myself, have made deliberate choices to place the historical, modern, and contemporary practices of Black artists at the center of our scholarship and teaching. That said, it rapidly became apparent to me that even the most cursory scrolling through such faculty pages confirmed that faculty of color were indeed tied to teaching art history that was in effect bound up with dominant perceptions of and attitudes toward ethnicity and race. This contrasted, dramatically and markedly, with white academics, who without exception taught the subjects they had chosen, and/or had been interested in researching for their doctorates. Scrolling through faculty web pages, it didn’t take much to guess the subject areas of faculty of color, but contrastingly, it was pretty much impossible to guess, or even speculate, on the subject areas taught by white scholars (a number of whom had responsibility for teaching African art, African American art, or African Diaspora art). White academics taught the widest range of art history topics, while academics of color were shackled (if that’s the correct word) to a much narrower band of subjects that were in turn aligned with the worth with which faculty of color were perceived. For academia to quantifiably advance, aspiring scholars of color must be reassured that absolutely no branch of art history is off-limits to them, and that, from their undergraduate degrees onward, the subject areas they choose within their majors should be as broad and as uncoupled from “race” as those pursued by their white college colleagues.8 Academia in general and art history in particular cannot progress, neither can it expect to attract a greater diversity of students if students of color suspect they are being corralled into predetermined or presumptive areas of study, based on an institution’s reading of their apparent race or ethnicity. In sum, these multiple problems can be traced to the systemic problematic of dividing knowledge into geographies and historical periods, which always favor a ­European narrative, particularly when such demarcations were set in place over the course of many decades. One of the weightiest signifiers of progressive scholarship must surely be the questioning and indeed the setting aside of the “traditional” geographic categories that so disfigure 53

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art history and its teaching. Subjects and categories such as “Arts of Asia and the Middle East,” “History of Art and Architecture and Middle Eastern Studies,” and “Contemporary Art and Collecting in the Middle East and North Africa” presuppose that there is a verifiable and uncontested part of the world we can call the East or the West. Historians and art historians should be asking more pressing questions of the ways in which “the East” continues to exist as if it is a stable and credible notion, not resulting from any kind of discriminatory pathology and cultural hegemony. But we simply cannot accept the demarcating of the world into East or West as these are wholly bogus and fictitious categories. To write, speak, teach of “Eastern Art” or its particularly accursed and dominant equivalent “Western Art” is to go along with pathologies that have been imposed on the world with the same sorts of ruinous consequences as the myth of race. The earth is a spherical entity, a round solid shape, with every point on its surface being equidistant from its center. As such, there is, very simply, no credible, believable, or geographical notion of “the East,” let alone the Middle East, Near East, or, God forbid, the Far East. Such spaces can only exist if one accepts the deeply flawed and ridiculous idea that a map of the world must inevitably be laid out, or imagined (or a model globe of the world must be spun) with China to the East, the Americas to the West, and Europe in the middle. If we spin a model globe, we could just as easily and just as credibly regard Asia as west and the Americas as east. The decidedly problematic east/west construction of the world has directly resulted from early European cartographers who could not conceive of Europe as anything other than central to their vision of the world. Not unrelated, this was a time in which the myth of racial categories came into existence, with the ongoing consequences that today, centuries later, many people would unquestionably accept racial categories such as “African,” “European,” or (I cringe as I write this) “Asiatic.” But more than that, of course, attribute particular characteristics to each of these racial categories. I suppose it must be progress of sorts that “Far East” is a term diminishing in credibility, and rightly so. The term “Far East” emerges from European geopolitical discourse in the fifteenth century, which declared the Far East to the farthest East, one could go, away from the obvious and natural center of the universe which was Europe. In this regard, Near East was the closest of the Easts and carried with it an imprecise reassurance of the nearness of its proximity to Europe, while Middle East was deemed to be the midway point of the Easts. Disastrously, this bogus demarcating of the world is the very foundation on which so much art history rests. Disastrous because Western Art is the only category presupposed to have an evolutionary history that goes from ancient to modern. All other categories – Eastern Art, Chinese Art, African Art, and so on, are still stuck within wholly historical (and therefore ahistorical) contexts that presuppose no cultural or artistic change, over time, not even over millennia. Categories such as Chinese Art, African Art, and so on are presumed to be perpetually grounded in the ancient, while Western Art is synonymous with an evolution from ancient, through medieval, through Renaissance, early Modern, and on into the Contemporary. It beggars belief that these are the foundations on which the teaching of Western Art (and consequently, the teaching of art history itself) rests.9 Tangentially, we also need to put pressure on the curious art historical standoff between Latin American Art and Caribbean Art, given that there are enmeshed and conjoined histories of these two fields that art historians can do more to recognize. In this regard it’s important to acknowledge the seismic importance of Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, an exhibition and accompanying catalog that decisively undermined the curious art historical standoff mentioned above. 54

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Consider visual art as a unique mode of communication capable of bridging the multicultural and multilingual Caribbean islands. Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, an exhibition catalog coedited by Tatiana Flores and Michelle Ann Stephens (curator of and advisor to the exhibition, respectively), suggests precisely this. Through engaging Caribbean literature and theory, they suggest that visual artwork (here including installation art, paintings, performance, photography, sculpture, and video) can reveal not only shared concerns among the insular Caribbean – that is, its islands – but also the possibility of a “collective and definable discourse around Caribbean visual aesthetics.”10 Returning to cartographic/geopolitical considerations, we need to put academic pressure on the noun and adjective “American.” Dictionary definitions might have it as “relating to or characteristic of the United States or its inhabitants,” but we know that within art history departments, more often than not, “American” pretty much means “white American,” and it pretty much is never presumed to mean “Black American,” “Latin American,” “Latinx American,” and so on. When a student chooses a class called “American Art,” depending on the period on which the class focusses, the student will invariably be fed a diet of the likes of Thomas Smith and John Singleton Copley (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Asher Brown Durand (nineteenth century), and Frank Stella and Jackson Pollock (twentieth century). Within art history, “American” is never taken to refer to artists of color who are, by way of troublesome hyphenations, pushed to the margins of American art. Even worse, or just as bad, a class that takes as its subject “American Art of the 20th Century” will often hurriedly, cursorily, squeeze in A ­ frican American artists such as Romare Bearden or Jacob Lawrence, at the end of, or at an otherwise cramped part of, the syllabus. As a fact, as a certainty, the full gamut of “­American Art” can very easily be taught with the art histories of artists of color as the central or dominant focus. Make no mistake, the credible teaching of American Art lies in the hands of faculty who challenge the systemic Eurocentrism that accords no places of importance to artists such as Edmonia Lewis, Robert Duncanson, Henry Tanner, Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden et al., in, for example, the teaching of American Art of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. In this regard, alternative course offerings such as “African American Art” just won’t do, signifying as they do, a systemic partiality and peripherality. We need, across the board, properly integrated courses in which key artists of different ethnicities are introduced and discussed in proper and sustained relation to each other, thereby emphatically dispelling the poisonous presumption of American dominantly equating with “white American,” rather than “Black American,” “Latin American,” “Latinx American,” and so on. It’s worth reiterating, and indeed stressing, that writing art history in the age of Black Lives Matter is a task, a challenge, for all of us as art historians. The previously mentioned perpetual and often explicit manifestation of race and ethnicity in art history faculty hires and curriculum delivery is a problem we must address. Because it is I believe more than a suspicion that a great many white art history faculty will comfort themselves that any faculty of color in their midst are primarily there to “attend” to curriculum diversity, thereby leaving numerically dominant white faculty to get on with the “real” business of teaching art history. The dominant subject areas of art history are, as I understand it, frequently taught with little to no use of lenses of diversity, Blackness, or anti-racism. But the anti-­ racist teaching of art history is a challenge and a matter for all of us who stand up to teach in the front of a classroom or expend our energies in the pursuit of our scholarship. There are 55

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absolutely no areas of art history immune from the urgency of not only diversifying the curriculum, to use the term of the moment, but embedding within it sustained anti-racism. In looking to advance credible and anti-racist scholarship, befitting of the current moment, we need to hold a critical lens the latter-day antics of institutions that declare themselves to be a part of a brave new world in which Black artists are enthusiastically embraced, curricular having been duly diversified, while these same institutions refuse to recognize their own complicity in histories of racism and exclusion. The first step to institutions – u ­ niversities, museums, major art galleries – doing better and responding to demands for change must surely be accountability for historical obstruction and intransigence. Art history can and must make itself relevant by recognizing and not shying away from the white supremacist histories of much of the art world. No one can deny that there seems to be, superficially at least, increased curatorial attention being paid to certain Black artists. But in the same ways in which white art critics and art historians tend not to, or have tended not to notice art world racism, white-controlled art galleries and museums tended not to recognize their own exclusionary practices and histories. The Tate now declares itself at the forefront of recognizing Black British artists, but this same institution had, for example, been perfectly happy to host white supremacist exhibitions such as Modern Art of the United States (1956) and The New American Painting (1959) neither of which contained any African American artists. It’s worth adding here that universities too must face up to their own egregious histories of mistreating Black artists and Black students, and those Black people applying for admission. Many universities across the United States have shameful histories of excluding Black students for no other reason than their ethnicity. Such blatant and unashamed discrimination was a feature of large swathes of academia until beyond the mid-twentieth century. Added to this, university art departments beyond number have histories of being painfully slow to properly introduce Black artists into their curricular offerings. A measure of many art history departments’ pretty much bankrupt attitude to historically diversifying the curriculum can be ascertained by the extent to which Africa-centric fields – African Art, ­African American Art, African Diaspora Art – have an institutional history of frequently being assigned to a solitary faculty member. Those art history departments that have a solitary faculty member responsible for the teaching of African/African American/African Diaspora art history are in effect requiring that professor to be responsible for teaching histories of art practices the world over. Not only that, but art practices going back millennia. This, needless to say, is an unacceptable and unreasonable teaching brief that effectively diminishes the academic standing of the obligatorily conjoined Africa-centric fields of African Art, African American Art, and African Diaspora Art. While there are, necessarily, shifting degrees of overlap between these three branches, a conclusive signifier of institutional progress will only be evident when faculty are hired and expected to teach on the specificities of their specialisms. I have previously raised in this text academia’s reluctance to embrace true diversity, as reflected in its clear, blunt and clumsy determination to equate Black faculty with the teaching of “Black” subjects. Hylton entreaties us to be watchful of the rise of such courses as “Global Modern and Contemporary Art,” fearing that they might not only do little to destabilize intransigent hierarchies within the academy, but might in fact perpetuate them. In the US some discipline areas are now habitually demarcated along racial lines, such as “African Americanist,” “Africanist art,” [sic] “African diaporaists” [sic]. In the UK, academe’s gravitation towards courses such as “global perspectives” or 56

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“non-Western art” may represent concessions to notions of inclusivity and diversity but, equally, these euphemistic and all-encompassing terms also serve to reinforce racial hierarchies within art history.11 Alongside courses such as “Global Modern and Contemporary Art,” we now see, springing up as other university offerings, courses such as “Contemporary Art and the Global,” “The Global Contemporary,” “Contemporary Art in a Global Perspective,” and “Photography, Film, and Video in Global Contemporary Art.” In the same way as “Modern and Contemporary,” within academia, has long been presupposed to be Eurocentric (or, in plain speaking, white), Black and brown art historians are often expected to write or teach about art, artists and subjects they are presumed to know the most about. These awkward manifestations of race in curricular must end, surely. It remains to be seen if new courses such as the ones mentioned above will displace or interrupt the hegemony and presumed centrality of white artists in modern and contemporary art history, or if, as Hylton suspects such new curricular offerings will function as little more than embellishments, decorations of diversity, or politically motivated add-ons, cobbled together in institutional response to the urgency of the times.12 The pressing question that we must ask ourselves is to what extent does this new crop of curricular offerings disturb or undermine the apparently formidable construct that is “Western Art”? After all, as Rachel Silveri and Trevor Stark so aptly describe it, Western Art presents itself as “a supposedly unbroken lineage stretching from the statuary of Ancient Greece to the modern period, a mythic construction that at once creates and naturalizes a shared cultural heritage of whiteness.”13 In their text, “Reactionary Art Histories,” Silveri and Stark ask their own urgent question, before proceeding to answer it by way of references to Édouard Glissant and other scholars: What would an art history look like that conceived culture as irreducible to any center or mean, whether biological or national? It might be an art history that would heed Édouard Glissant’s call for a poetics that “makes every periphery into a center; furthermore, it abolishes the very notion of center and periphery.” This is not quite the same as a “global art history” that replicates the logic of empire, placing the “art of all nations” within a language and framework “of the West,” a gesture Kaira Cabañas diagnoses as “the monolingualism of the global.” Such an art history, following Glissant, results in “a culture that [is] projected onto the world (with the aim of dominating it) and a language that [is] presented as universal (with the aim of providing legitimacy to the attempt at domination).”14 In A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art, Saloni Mathur also puts necessary pressure on what is described as The increasing preoccupation with the rise of a globalized art world and the suspect category of “global contemporary art,” a broad, generally ahistorical banner under which the great difficulties of entire societies, their particularities and paradoxical trajectories, are too often superficially treated or wholly subsumed.15 Returning to the matter of the Tate, it was perhaps with good reason that the Tate incurred the wrath of the writer of the White Pube text, so much so that the institution was the only one named and singled out for vociferous dismissal, by way of the expletive used in the title. 57

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For those who care to recognize the Tate’s historical and thoroughly outrageous treatment of Black British artists, numerous examples abound. Regarding the ways in which fulsome institutional recognition of Frank Bowling came only relatively late in the day, Hylton noted, in his “Decolonising the Curriculum” text that “scouring Tate: A History from 1998 by Frances Spalding reveals not a single mention of Bowling.” Even though Bowling was an active and prolific contemporary of the likes of David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj. Those ignorant (willfully or otherwise) of Bowling’s histories of exclusion are likely to regard his recent successes – Tate retrospective, Royal Academician, knighthood – as evidence of a long-standing institutional embrace, rather than opportunistic antics of an art world relieved to be getting away with it. But as Hylton ruefully states, “These seemingly different forms of historical recovery nullify rather than address the incalculable damage systematic art-world exclusions have had and continue to have both on individual practitioners and on wider narratives of art history.”16 The cause of more credible art history is decidedly not advanced by the opportunistic texts proffered by scholars scrambling to have their written works published in the range of catalogs that document the latter day, though decidedly partial escalation in exhibition opportunities afforded certain Black artists. The same coterie of scholars whose texts now adorn publications on Black artists’ work, reflecting the Tate’s recent curatorial undertakings, is the same coterie of scholars who have had nothing whatsoever to say about the Tate’s decade-upon-decade ignoring of Black British artists’ practices. The partiality of this state of affairs led Hylton to ask, in his “Decolonising the Curriculum” text if “there is a correlation between the type of voices of authority who now champion excluded practitioners and the voices which previously ignored their exclusion?”17 Good question. For too many decades, art history has not been a discipline that has paid attention to let alone come down on the side of those who are brutalized by the dominant culture, as a matter of routine. We can of course go back further than decades because the state of highly privileged academic seclusion or separation from the facts and practicalities of the real world has long been signified in the phrase the ivory tower, given to us by the French nineteenth-century writer Charles Sainte-Beuve. But the time has come, or indeed, the time is long overdue, for us to consider the deadly implications of us accepting as some sort of natural order the existence of a quarantined environment of intellectual pursuit disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life, particularly as experienced by Black people. Now, more than ever, we need an art history that by its very nature challenges the dominant order and resists racism and brutality. To be clear, I am not suggesting that all art history should concern itself with explicitly addressing or otherwise referencing the shocking manifestations of white supremacy with which our history is saturated. I am, though, asserting that systemically challenging the manifestations of white supremacy I just referred to is fundamental to the progress of humanity. As scholars, as art historians, none of what we write, research, and teach should carry about it implications that what happened in the streets of Minneapolis (George Floyd), or a South Georgia neighborhood (Ahmaud Arbery), or even within the supposed sanctuary of an apartment in Louisville, Kentucky (Breonna Taylor) is beyond the scope of our professional interests. Traditionally, well-meaning liberals and white people of conscience have, for the most part, responded to everything from slavery to Jim Crow, to lynching, to police brutality with largely, or ultimately, ineffectual sentiments of sympathy or, in more forceful declarations perhaps, solidarity. Ultimately though, as charged by the most strident critics (such as the White Pube writer) of what was dubbed “Blackout Tuesday,” gestures of sympathy or solidarity remain just that – gestures, if/when they remain markedly uncoupled from what we as art historians are trained to do. 58

Writing Art History in the Age of Black Lives Matter

The year 2020 was in so many respects an extraordinary year, in articulations of ­ ushback against the supposed immunity of art world institutions to pressures for real p social change. The year saw the coming to prominence of the phrase, the initiative, and the hashtag, created by Art Worker La Tanya S. Autry and Museum Educator Mike Murawski Museums Are Not Neutral. Neither, of course, are universities in general and art history departments in particular. In these perpetually febrile and urgent times, neutrality, or the myth of neutrality is less and less an option behind which any of us in academia can hide. Perhaps we can understand our mission, as scholars, as lecturers, as professors, if we add our own areas to the “not neutral” understanding. Art history is not neutral. Art criticism is not neutral. Teaching is not neutral. None of these things ever have been “neutral,” but their non-neutrality grows ever more apparent. As scholars we need, more than ever, to consign to history the myth of the supposed disinterestedness, objectivity, and neutrality of our work. Scholarship needs, more than ever, to declare itself as being on the side of social and racial justice. Otherwise, it runs ever greater risks of being enmeshed in irrelevance. Beyond the ways in which fields such as African American and African Diaspora art history have an oftentimes clear and apparent relevance to the advancement of civil rights, scholars and professors (whose primary fields are everything from Roman to Byzantine, Medieval to Early Modern, Latin American to Chinese) cannot and should not be inclined to see their work as being above or beyond the real-world challenges all around us. If universities are truly to be welcoming places of social and racial justice, we must see to it that our work reflects these aspirations. We all have a role in writing art history in the age of Black Lives Matter.

Notes 1 Eddie Chambers, “Concluding Considerations,” Routledge Companion to African American Art History (New York and London: Routledge, 2020), 467. 2 See for example, Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price, “Decolonizing Art History,” Art History 43, no. 1 (February 2020): 8–66. 3 https://www.thewhitepube.co.uk/riots, accessed June 4, 2021. 4 https://thetab.com/uk/2021/01/20/only-155-out-of-23000-university-professors-are-black190836#:~:text=Only%20155%20out%20of%20over,total%20professorships%20in%20 the%20UK accessed June 7, 2021. The statistic merits closer inspection. It’s not known, from the source, if “Black” refers to academics of African and African-Caribbean background, or whether other academics of color are included in the statistic. It might be the case that the figures exclude academics of South Asian background, but the source did not elaborate on such important details. 5 Richard Hylton, “Decolonising the Curriculum,” Art Monthly 426 (May 2019): 12. Text in box brackets this author’s addition. 6 Ibid., 13. 7 Ibid. 8 For my arguments and opinions on the inevitable association of faculty of color with predetermined or presupposed areas of teaching, see my text, “It’s Time to Share,” Panorama, Anne Monahan and Isabel L. Taube, eds., “Self-Criticality,” Colloquium, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 6, no. 2 (Fall 2020). 9 I have not mentioned, in this text, the problem of Egypt not routinely being regarded as part of the African continent, but instead finding itself routinely relocated into, or popularly imagined to be in, the Middle East. For a sustained critique of the problematics of the cartographic/geopolitical considerations raised in this text, see Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 10 From a review of the exhibition by Adrienne Rooney, published by caa.reviews, August 9, 2019, http://caareviews.org/reviews/3574#.YhgD_5PMJPV, accessed February 24, 2022. The quote at

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Eddie Chambers the end of the passage comes from Tatiana Flores, “Inscribing Into Consciousness: The Work of Caribbean Art,” in Tatiana Flores and Michelle A. Stephens, eds., Relational Undercurrrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (Long Beach: Museum of Latin American Art, distributed by Duke University Press, 2017), 29. “Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, curated by Dr. Tatiana Flores [...] focuses, first and foremost, on locating thematic continuities in the art of the Caribbean islands. Through the trope of the archipelago, Relational Undercurrents challenges the understanding of the Caribbean as discontinuous, isolated, hermetic, and beyond comprehension.” https://molaa.org/relational-undecurrents, accessed February 24, 2022. For more on the problem of presenting Latin American art as being wholly separate and distinct from Caribbean Art, see my text, “ ‘There’s no place like home.’: The Enigma of Guyana in Frank Bowling’s map paintings,” Eddie Chambers, World is Africa: Writings on Diaspora Art (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021). 11 Richard Hylton, “Decolonising the Curriculum,” Art Monthly 426 (May 2019): 15. 12 I should of course stress that there is nothing the least bit “narrow” about the teaching of African art, African American art, or African Diaspora art, as indeed, there is nothing the least bit “narrow” about scholarship on African artists, African American artists, or African Diaspora artists. But there is no getting away from the extent to which scholars of color tend to teach on areas and subjects deemed to “naturally,” or inevitably be theirs. This matter goes to the heart of what is wrong with dominant manifestations of art history. Its branches maintain racialized or raced dimensions. 13 Rachel Silveri and Trevor Stark, “Reactionary Art Histories,” Selva: A Journal of the History of Art 2 (Fall 2020): 3–30, 9. 14 Ibid., 27. The Édouard Glissant quotes come from Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 29 and 28. The Kaira M. Cabañas quote comes from “Monolingualism of the Global,” in Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 145. 15 Saloni Mathur, A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art (Duke University Press, 2019), xi. 16 Richard Hylton, “Decolonising the Curriculum,” Art Monthly 426 (May 2019): 13. 17 Ibid. For a discussion of the Tate’s history of ignoring Black artists, see Eddie Chambers, Things Done Change: The Cultural Politics of Recent Black Artists in Britain (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi Editions, 2012).

Selected Bibliography Chambers, Eddie. Things Done Change: The Cultural Politics of Recent Black Artists in Britain. ­Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi Editions, 2012. Chambers, Eddie, ed. Routledge Companion to African American Art History. New York and ­London: Routledge, 2020. Chambers, Eddie. “It’s Time to Share.” Panorama. Anne Monahan and Isabel L. Taube, eds. “SelfCriticality.” Colloquium. Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 6, no. 2 (Fall 2020). Chambers, Eddie. “‘There’s No Place Like Home.’: The Enigma of Guyana in Frank Bowling’s map paintings.” In Eddie Chambers, World Is Africa: Writings on Diaspora Art. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021. Grant, Catherine and Dorothy Price. “Decolonizing Art History.” Art History 43, no. 1 (February 2020): 8–66. https://www.thewhitepube.co.uk/riots Hylton, Richard. “Decolonising the Curriculum.” Art Monthly 426 (May 2019): 11–15. Lewis, Martin W. and Karen E. Wigen. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Mathur, Saloni. A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2019. Silveri, Rachel and Trevor Stark. “Reactionary Art Histories.” Selva: A Journal of the History of Art, 2 (Fall 2020): 3–30.

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2 BEING AN INDIGENOUS ART HISTORIAN IN THE TWENTYFIRST CENTURY How Can Māori Adornment Reveal New Ways of Thinking about Art, Its Histories, and Futures Ngarino Ellis Acknowledgments: To the University of Auckland for Research and Study Leave to enable me to spend time thinking and writing this piece; to the Royal Society Marsden Fund for supporting the Ngā Taonga o Wharawhara: The World of Māori Body Adornment project; and to my bubbles at #18 and #23 during Lockdown 5.0 during which I wrote this chapter.

Introduction In late July 2021, with the Olympic Games in full flight, the weekly magazine The Listener published an open letter written by seven professors from the University of Auckland, including the acting Dean of Science. Concerned about a proposal to amend the high school science curricula by including a discussion of the discipline’s complicity in colonisation, they argue that Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) could not be “defined as science itself.” The reaction by academia, funders, and Māori was swift and robust, criticising the authors for being racist and out of step with current ways of thinking. The following week New Zealand’s most prestigious art prize was awarded to the Māori women’s collective Mata Aho (comprised of Erena Baker, Sarah Hudson, Bridget Reweti, and Terri Te Hau) and Maureen Lander. Their joint work was Atapō (2020), a nine-meter tall installation of sheets of hand-made black netting made from insect mesh, wool, muka (stripped harakeke, phormium tenax), and cotton. Representing time and space in the drifts between female ancestors Hine-tītama and Hine-Nui-te-pō, the work celebrated mana wahine (strength as women). It reiterated the transmission of knowledge through the generations. These two events provide the backdrop for this chapter. Both episodes remind us of the context in which we think and write and teach as Māori art historians. As a discipline, I argue here that we have been prompted most recently by global political events which impact our art landscapes, including the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the impact

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of COVID-19, and the ongoing murders of Aboriginal peoples in custody (Australia) and Native women and girls (US, Canada). They compel us to think about brave new art history, which uses our present to rethink our past and consider what our people need in the twenty-first century. This chapter takes stock of the worlds of art history in Aotearoa New Zealand, specifically from a Māori perspective, or more particularly from a Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Porou tribal outlook. It lobbies to create multi-vocal art histories, created within specific locations and cultures, which together present a more nuanced and textured account of dynamic and transformational art. Firstly I offer my version of Māori art history with its key facets; then I examine how these ideas are being applied to a current research project focused on adornment; and lastly, I reflect on the potential of this kind of thinking to shape the discipline moving forward.

The Māori Art History Kete (aka Toolbox) This book gives rise to an Indigenous re-imagining of art history. Rather than responding to coloniality in Aotearoa, this chapter will flip the narrative and concentrate on Māori methods, theories, and terminologies, looking out to the broader discipline. In this way, I am guided by lawyer Moana Jackson (Ngāti Kahungunu), who challenged museums in a keynote speech at the national Museums Aotearoa Conference in 2016 to think about what he called ‘re Māorification.’ This, he explained, meant restoring Mana Motuhake (authority) to Māori. Inspired by this call, Puawai Cairns (Ngāti Pukenga, Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi), then Head of Mātauranga Māori at Te Papa Tongarewa, wrote a list of how this can be practiced in a museum context – key for her are the verbs she used – care, understand, respect, recognise, humanise. She described Mana Motuhake as a ‘sovereign space,’ as “imagined spaces of indefinable creativity and independence.”1 For art history, re-Māorification recognises that Māori have been practicing art history in a broader sense for many hundreds of years. This process is culturally informed and articulates specific ways of thinking about art. Jackson provides more insights here:2 To Māori in Aotearoa [decolonization] means knowing a history which did not begin with the arrival of the first strangers in our land but centuries before in the monasteries, courthouses, corporations, and inns in Europe where “ordinary” Europeans came to believe they could and should rule the world. With this in mind, I present below some critical characteristics of Māori art history. This is by no means a checklist, but rather is an attempt to pull together some thoughts and practices mindful that this is a living document, constantly changing according to time and space and people (as all good art history should).

Māori Art Embodies Māori Values In Aotearoa, Māori art history is driven and shaped by values passed down through the generations. In Te Ao Māori, we talked about art forms, artists, and practices for centuries, both here and in Hawaiki. Our art was not created in a vacuum but was driven by patrons and artists who used it as a vehicle to explain the past, record the present, to transform their futures. Our collectors and dealers were often chiefs, our curators who exhibited taonga for ceremonial occasions such as the Tahua Roa. Our art historians are the elders 62

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and communities who vetted newly made art. Consequently, Māori art was dynamic and continues to be constantly evolving. A central framework is whakapapa, or genealogical ascent and descent: ancestors’ names are recorded, and relationships charted through time and space. Whakapapa anchors us into the land, back across to the Pacific, and right through to Te Pō, when everywhere was dark and there was much potential. Wrapped around whakapapa is kōrero or the stories which add colour and texture to the names. This kōrero is encapsulated in a range of oral forms, including whakataukī, mōteatea, waiata, karanga, karakia, and haka. These have been sung, chanted, and called for hundreds of years, transmitting vital information about the artistic landscape, including the terms of essential adornments and the significance of moko practice. Jackson would describe these art activities as “once the expression of a proud and effective political independence.”3 Many of the oral histories themselves changed in the process of their transcription in the nineteenth century with the introduction of literacy, but they continue nonetheless to provide critical pathways into the past for the art historian; in addition, their oral recitation today underscores the ongoing significance of the oral for Māori. Values also surrounded and shaped our taonga tuku iho (ancestral treasures). Their stories speak about connections between and within whānau and as part of a more comprehensive political and economic matrix. Their association with different ancestors increases their mana (power, prestige). The mana of types of natural resources, such as pounamu (greenstone), was such that its access could prompt warfare, such as the attack by Ngāti Toa on Ngāi Tahu in the South Island in the late 1820s. A person’s mana was enhanced by the taonga in their care – on social and ceremonial occasions, they might wear prestigious cloaks and carry powerful weapons to signal their mana publicly. Mana also extended to the frequent naming of taonga after ancestors or other loved ones. Naming was a vital part of the formal opening ceremonies of architectural structures, such as pataka (raised decorated storehouses). The patron often cemented relationships and confirmed whakapapa with the gift of names and solidified their mana and that of their community. One prime example is the series of pataka built in the 1850s and communally known as Ngā Pou o te Kīngitanga, which were individually named and placed to set out the physical boundaries of the Kīngitanga pan-tribal movement. Mana then was enhanced on many levels. Mana was closely related to the concept of tapu. While this might easily translate as ‘sacred,’ it is much more nuanced in practice. Recognition of tapu ensures cultural and physical safety for our work. It makes sure we have the highest respect for those art practices which involved the head (our most sacred body part) and blood. Anything that might transgress this tapu, particularly food, is kept away. Taonga made from human bone are particularly tapu. One example is kōauau (sound instruments played with the mouth or nose) which were sometimes crafted from human arm or thigh bones, sometimes from enemies to demean their personal mana and tapu. The kōauau named Murirangawhenua, for instance, has a long heritage: made from and named after the tohunga (ritual specialist) who provided the bone, used by Tūtānekai of Te Arawa to call to his paramour Hinemoa.4 The kōauau records this history and is spoken to as the living embodiment of Murirangawhenua by Te Arawa today.

Prioritise Māori Sources and Look in Non-Traditional Spaces When writing about Māori art, Māori voices must be privileged so that Māori are telling their own stories. This ensures that others outside the culture do not mediate their 63

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narratives through their worldviews, as different values and histories shape their lives. ­Historically, most writing about Māori art has suppressed Māori agency – their voices were increasingly excluded as non-Māori took control of New Zealand and created their own histories, which ultimately benefited them. As they say, history is typically written by the victors. The Te Māori exhibition (1984–1986) displayed in mainly art galleries in the US and New Zealand demonstrated how the histories of taonga in museums had been associated with their colonial donors – in the displays, the text prioritised tribal histories as informed by the original iwi. In this way, the taonga were seen within a broader and older history and related the taonga in museums to present-day descendants. We can hear first-hand about art practices from artists and curators, and museum staff, as well as pakeke (elders) and rangatahi (youth). Engaging with multiple generations is essential, and respect for pakeke is a central value for us. There are non-traditional sites as well, including radio interviews, conference presentations (including those recorded and uploaded to YouTube), podcasts (such as the Taringa series on Spotify), and blogs (such as Pantograph Punch or The Spinoff). In addition, Māori thinkers are all over social media, especially Instagram and Facebook, and to a lesser extent Twitter. These sources challenge the discipline’s hierarchy of references (with books and articles at the top)5 and lobbies for a re-consideration of sites of knowledge production to reflect places where Māori are located. In these spaces, Māori can offer nuanced, articulate, and meaningful perspectives on the ever-dynamic art world they are involved in.

Draw on Your Tribal Identity Māori art history projects need to be driven by Māori for Māori. My identity as a tribal woman inflects how I view the art world and care to write about it. This is exciting and is an approach that makes me more engaged with the subject at hand. Where possible, there is a familial link to the material being researched – this is a deliberate strategy and is part of our responsibilities to our communities. Within Aotearoa, tribal art books are written by tribal members who have sought by their very existence to challenge the idea of a single one-dimensional Māori art. Te Ata (2002) and Te Puna (2007) were driven by tribal art historians and writers (in these cases, Witi Ihimaera, Deidre Brown, and myself) to provide a platform for tribal artists, curators, and writers to celebrate art in their own areas.

Write for a Māori Audience First and Foremost In projects, a Māori audience is the most important. This is part of the process of reMāorification of knowledge, acknowledging the insidious ways colonisation has dispossessed Māori from access to taonga (especially if overseas), and, more importantly, crafting the narratives which surround these treasures. The stories of the ancestors (artists, patrons, wearers) have been pitched to a non-Māori audience through the choice of language and style of writing. There are certain formalities of art history language which have alienated Māori audiences – how we write as Māori is of no less value because it does not conform to some ‘traditional academic style.’ Formal art history texts have been reified in universities globally as the style of art history; here, objectivity is promoted, and the way of writing is obtuse, opaque, and out-of-sync with wider audiences or even Māori. In doing so, they support and encourage these institutions, which were initially built by and for privileged heterosexual, cis white men, and kept a status quo that actively silences Māori voices. Yet, 64

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we know that languages are dynamic and change over time. In the twenty-first century, we can and must redefine what ‘academic writing’ can look like. Only by doing this can we enable a wider group of researchers and writers to feel welcome in art history and supported in their kaupapa/goals. Writing is more appealing to a broad range of Māori audiences.6 The Māori art history audience comprises multiple generations, some of whom may be Māori first language (both old and now young). Using Te Reo Māori can connect with Māori; other strategies include using the term ‘we’ to locate the writer as Māori, by using Māori structures of language (such as following the format of a karanga for an essay), and even extending to ensuring that Māori are a core part of the production team, such as editors, illustrators, and book designers.

Use Māori Terminology Related to audience is terminology. As part of the project of self-determination, Indigenous terms should be used to describe Indigenous ideas, art forms, and practices. It is respectful to not translate or Anglicise particular fields at the risk of over-simplifying multi-­dimensional concepts. Hence, moko is not ‘tattoo,’ patu are not ‘clubs.’ raranga is not merely ‘weaving.’ Indeed, the values with which our taonga are imbued cannot be simplistically translated – tapu is not simply ‘sacred,’ mana is not just ‘power.’ Whakapapa is not easily Anglicised to ‘family tree.’ Translations should be sourced from Māori,7 mindful that these translations can and have changed through time and space: one tribe’s understanding might be different for another. Other words also need deleting from lexicons: the term ‘pre-history’ is often used by archaeologists, in particular, to describe a time before writing. Yet Māori and many other Indigenous groups refute this term as it implies that it was only with the arrival of writing with Europeans that true history began and that our cultures did ‘write’ but did so using a complex mnemonic system of designs, colours, and figures. Indeed, Māori organise time differently, especially in relation to art. Hirini Moko Mead (Ngāti Awa) wrote the most widely used system based on the whakataukī ‘E kore au e ngaro, he kākano ahau i ruia mai I Rangiātea’ (I will never be lost as I am a seed sown from Rangiātea). Time can also be measured by generations, moving back and forth through and across time and space – time is at once compressed and expanded. Our primal parents, Ranginui (Sky Father) and Papaptūānuku (Earth Mother), are spoken of as ‘parents’ to reinforce their continual presence in our lives. Even in the 1870s, ancestors were seen as contemporary figures: artists in the huge meeting house Rongopai (1887, 85 × 35 ft) at Waituhi painted the tipuna Hinehakirirangi dressed in modern clothing, including a bustle and fancy heeled boots, and trendy hairstyle though she lived at least 16 generations before. By depicting her in this way, time is irrelevant. Her story, including bringing the kūmara (sweet potato) with her from the Pacific, is easily remembered as she looks just like the community using the house.

Use Māori Research in Place of Strict Delineation of ‘Theories’ and ‘Methods’ According to scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Porou, and daughter of Hirini Moko Mead [above]), “Theory at its most simple level is important … [as] it helps make sense of reality. It enables us to make assumptions and predictions about the world in which we live.”8 Using Māori theories and methodologies can help a project 65

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be grounded in Te Ao Māori. We are guided by critical Māori writers and thinkers who, though not art historians, can influence the field and push it to keep expanding its boundaries and foci. Psychiatrist Tā (Sir) Mason Durie (Rangitāne, Ngāti Kauwhata, Ngāti Raukawa) conceptualised Māori well-being as ‘Te Whare Tapa Wha’ (1984), which was based visually on a meeting house. Each aspect (spiritual, mental and emotional, physical, family and social, land) offers an approach to Māori art, recognising that all parts are required to ensure Māori well-being. Good leadership is also essential. The Honourable Justice Joe Williams (Ngāti Pūkenga, Te Arawa) surprised Māori staff at my university recently by provoking us to take the lead, in this case, about Vision Mātauranga.9 He called on us to drive the change and not to wait for others. These writers’ words are powerful and make us reflect on our roles as change-makers in our disciplines, workplaces, schools, and communities. Smith talks about how others describe Kaupapa Māori research as ‘methodologies’: “This form of naming is about bringing to the center and privileging indigenous values, attitudes and practices rather than disguising them within Westernized labels.”10 She argues that for Māori, theory and methods are part of the project of ‘research’ and are interdependent. This differs from the emphasis within current art history, which prefers to separate them. Can a Kaupapa Māori Research (KMR) approach then be applied to Māori art history? Can KMR become the norm in the broader art history discipline? Indeed, as art history knows, theory focuses on critique and evaluation based on the lens through which we understand the material at hand. The approach helps us consider the bigger picture of what we are looking at and presents us with options for analysis. Just as Feminism prompted a re-evaluation of not only who we were looking at, but more importantly, critiquing the structures that had set white men’s art as ‘real art,’ so too can Indigenous theory empower researchers and teachers to re-evaluate the discipline. As part of KMR, we include Mana Wahine theory, for instance, which draws on the exploits of our female ancestors to rethink history and re-asserts their voice into narratives. Artists have helped in this project: painter Robyn Kahukiwa (Ngāti Porou, Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, Ngāti Kōnohi, Te Whānau-a-Ruataupare) collaborated with writer Patricia Grace (Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa, Te Āti Awa) in 1988 to create a series of works identifying prominent women from our whakapapa in their Wahine Toa series, as did multi-media artist Lisa Reihana (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tū) in her Digital Marae installation. These works identify the tipuna and set them up as positive role models for new generations of rangatahi and kōtiro hereunto taught through schools and books a very patriarchal male-dominated history. Similarly, art historian Ngahuia Te Awekotuku (Tūhoe, Waikato) has examined takatāpui (LGBTQI+) histories; historically, these histories were recorded in human figures carved on the surfaces of wooden waka huia and papahou (containers for precious treasures). These celebrated positive takatāpui relationships, which were forced into hiding by colonial communities as part of their heteronormative discourse based on English anti-gay bigotry. Both Mana Wahine and Takatāpui theories enable us to see the past differently and resurrect the lives of people whose value has been misaligned as part of the colonial endeavour. KMR also covers how to research. There are values-based methods to be taken on board. One prominent example is based on the value of tapu. In practice, this looks like not undertaking any research or writing on tapu art practices such as moko (designs incised on the skin) on the dining room table or in bed; reading books about heru (combs) is not

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undertaken while eating; resources about tapu topics (including whakapapa) are not placed on top of food, or under headwear (including combs and hats); using safe spiritual spaces for lectures on human remains, and even researching sound instruments made of human bone on the internet is not done in places where food might be. Indeed, some tapu material is deemed so sacred that only specific whānau can work on it. This might seem extreme, but we know of cases where there have been breaches, and sickness or even death has ensued. It is essential to pass this on to new researchers – one of my Pākehā undergraduate students who knew of these tikanga once even went so far as to dispose of his research notes carefully. This could be understood as a whakapapa of methodology: as my mother taught me, I also turn and teach my students and research assistants.

Work Collaboratively Where Possible Another method of working is as a community – a whānau. We activate the concept of ‘ope,’ which historically described a group of people (usually related) who worked on a single project, such as planting. It can and has also been a critical methodology in largescale arts projects. Our ancestors would often bring together several artists to complete community artworks – hundred-foot long waka taua (war canoes) were built by groups of carvers, funded by a chief and their community who would house the workers, source local materials, pay the artists, and put on a significant ceremony to launch the canoe when completed. As the waka taua stopped being made by the 1860s, the ope concept shifted to the new expression of group pride: the whare whakairo, or decorated meeting house. On another level, this ope methodology encourages us to work across disciplines. Indeed, we must seek out Māori colleagues, given there are so few of us actively writing about Māori art (I am the only one in a tertiary [college] art history programme). The operations of the ope includes supporting early career researchers by supervising projects, including them as part of projects, introducing them to those whose work they refer to, and ensuring their research is examined by experts in the field. It might see a project bringing in others from other disciplines who have also researched art (such as anthropology, archaeology and museum studies) and Māori (including history and science). The ope approach also encourages receiving guidance from pakeke. Respect for elders is core for Indigenous groups – in research projects, they ensure tikanga is being followed and provide a depth of mātauranga that is often not found in any book or article. In some projects, an advisory group is set up at the start of the project to help shape the research from the outset (rather than asking afterward). Often pakeke are related to the researchers, ensuring that once the project ends, the relationship will continue. Reciprocity is central: elders are offering you pearls of wisdom (though sometimes you may not see this), while you need to ensure that you keep giving back – some may call this ‘utu’ though this is commonly known as revenge, rather than the original intention which was about balance and ensuring utu in relationships and acts. In interviewing, for instance, as the pakeke give their time, so you too must in preparing (baking a cake, making something to offer), as well as during the discussion (ensuring it does not take too long, that they are not inconvenienced in any way, that whānau are consulted), and afterwards (taking copies of any publication, including them in future projects, checking in on them from time to time as the years go by). Again, this is the responsibility of the Māori researcher.

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Case Study: Ngā Taonga O Wharwhara: The World of Māori Body Adornment So, how might all this look in reality? This final section introduces a current three- to fiveyear project funded through the Royal Society entitled Ngā Taonga o Wharawhara: The World of Māori Body Adornment. Conceptualising the project as KMR, it is multi-faceted and multi-vocal. While I am listed as the sole PI, the ope approach enables me to support a team of early career researchers (mostly Māori) by funding three Masters scholarships and three research assistants. Oral sources are the focus of one of the Master’s students, and adornments returned as part of Waitangi Tribunal settlements of another. The research assistants compiled a database of adornments in museums, set up a website and email, and are researching adornments sold through auction houses. Interviewing contemporary artists will be necessary once I have applied for Ethics approval to ensure the study includes and prioritises the voices of artists as well as whānau who care for adornment today. Visits are being made to museums, auction records are being scoured, archival manuscripts consulted. These are all being reviewed about their relationship to our core concepts of mana, tapu, korero, whakapapa, and whenua. All are environmentally inter-woven. The project calls for a re-evaluation of art history terms. The label ‘adornment’ is often folded into the field of ‘craft’ or ‘object-based art.’ Yet, for Indigenous communities, adornment is a powerful method to record histories and reinforce social norms and political hierarchies. Adornment also challenges gender rankings that continue to debilitate art history: for Māori, it is unclear who exactly made many of the earlier adornments we now recognise as taonga tuku iho, and as such, the forms stand outside judgment based on the gender of the maker. Taking a Mana Wāhine approach, we understand that adornments are named after both men and women and were given by both; some represented only female forms, notably the hei tiki, which symbolised Hineteiwaiwa, or the atua of childbirth. We are researching the lives of women who practiced moko, considered by many as being a male-only occupation because of the tapu involved, and reinforcing the fact that both men and women now practice as artists (Figure 2.1). The adornments themselves are powerful. Many are considered as living, being named after ancestors, and took many years to make. Whole villages would be established to work raw matter into desired treasures. The materials themselves were ritually significant, personifying the ancestors they were named after and highly desired, driving a trade across the country for any pieces.11 Adornments were highly prized, and wars might be fought to acquire a single adornment; they took on new meanings as they grew ‘older’ and were associated with different people. Yet, as with all fashion, their popularity waxed and waned: witness, for instance, the perceived popularity of the rei puta, a shaped whale tooth popular with rangatira (chiefs) according to Captain Cook when he saw and collected them in the 1760s. Conversely the oral record barely mentions rei puta, and indeed any named rei puta are yet to be identified. Today artists make them out of whalebone, as well as beef bone and greenstone, as well as synthetic materials. Similarly, the art of Mata whakarewa, skin painting, so popular right up to the nineteenth century, is currently being revived by kapa haka (performance) groups and others who paint their skins for formal political occasions. We have read beautiful stories from oral histories which challenge the meta-narrative of a one-dimensional Māori culture. We have uncovered some images and records that show how truly fabulous, dynamic, fashion-forward, and at times outrageous our ancestors were. Imagine seeing the elder who placed a live bird through his ear and enjoyed the spectacle of

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Figure 2.1  Hei Tiki, material: pounamu; Aotearoa New Zealand; height 6.7 cm; Collection: Hermann Meyer/J.F.G. Umlauff, 1903. © Linden-Museum Stuttgart; 33599; Photo: ­ Dominik Drasdow.

it dying; another elder whose pipe smoke seeped out through the heavily incised lines on his cheek moko; or the warriors who tipped whole calabashes of red kōkōwai (pigment) over their heads in preparation for battle to imitate blood to frighten their enemies. Indeed, there was even a person called a Wharawhara, who in today’s terms would be called a stylist, whose role it was to dress a chief, layering on finely woven cloaks, combing the hair into fashionable styles, placing adornments made from whalebone and greenstone around the neck, scenting the body with perfumes, smearing brilliantly coloured designs on the body and face, with the resulting body clearly stating that this was someone of immense mana. Adornment today retains its significance for Māori and continues to create debate. Take the example of the Māori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi who was asked to leave the parliamentary debating chamber because he was wearing a hei tiki12 instead of a tie (compulsory for men). Waititi explained that he was wearing ‘Māori business wear.’ The Speaker of the House, Trevor Mallard, explained that while he disagreed with the rules, he was bound to uphold them and refused Waititi the right to speak. Waititi handed a question he was due to ask his fellow co-leader, a woman wearing a tie, and walked out. This mobilised other institutions to rethink their dress codes, including several high schools who then allowed Māori students to wear moko and adornments visibly. The Ministry of Justice also allowed taonga to be worn instead of a tie in court.

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Conclusion: Some Māori Reflections on Art History Indigenous art historians can and do take a ‘pick n mix’ approach to art history. In particular, they draw on methods and theories to make sense of the art in their worlds. While Audre Lorde may have challenged how we could break the master’s house using the master’s tools, in Aotearoa, there is an alternative – in 1949, the Ngāti Porou stateman Tā Apirana Ngata encouraged a young girl to ‘use the tools of the Pakeha’ to get ahead in the world. Indeed, he did so in practice, driving the passing of legislation to create a national school of Māori art in the 1920s; its artists worked on over 100 projects nationally, building and decorating meeting houses, churches, and dining halls. We can use methods such as iconography and formal analysis to assist in understanding and interpreting our art. However, these methods are transformed when applied to Māori art as there is a different cultural context, and new meanings formed: a carving, for instance, might be described in terms of form, shape, texture and so forth, but within Te Ao Māori they have added layers, such as in relation to symbolism and iconography. For Māori art history, this offers a wealth of tools with which to work. At the same time, these methods and theories have parallels in Te Ao Māori. Biography is a clear example. As I have described elsewhere,13 this biographical approach relates to the Māori concept of whakapapa. Genealogical ascent and descent can be applied to objects named ancestral treasures, materials, forms, and makers. This is a KMR approach, which reveals the complex and dynamic nature of Māori art worlds. These different ways enrich art history as a whole discipline. This chapter argues that art history has been active and activated globally for millennia. It challenges the elitists who decree that it originated in Europe, where European knowledge is privileged, and colonisation remains. Art history in the twenty-first century has the capacity – the responsibility – to shapeshift. Just as our ancestor Māui transformed into different animals to get what he wanted, so too does the discipline now need to reflect on its place in the world and in community. Imagine how powerful the field could be if the gatekeepers stepped aside and encouraged a truly global art history. This is not easy work but requires dedication and perseverance by everyone, but it is only in this way that our discipline can remain relevant and attractive to new generations. Falling student numbers and governmental disinterest worldwide14 demonstrate how vital such a study is. Indigenous art historians can be the circuit-breakers and have a role in research and teaching, presenting nuanced and culturally based art histories and creating resources conveyed through our personal lens. The final words are from Moana Jackson:15 “In the end, decolonization simply means having faith that we can still be brave enough to change an imposed reality.”

Glossary Aotearoa Haka Hapū Hei tiki Iwi Karakia Kōkōwai Karanga

The Māori name for New Zealand Performance to inspire awe and fear Sub-tribes Adornment shaped like a human figure Tribe Prayers Red pigment Ritual calling 70

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Kōauau Sound instrument played with the mouth or nose Kōrero Speech Mana Power, prestige Mana wāhine Strength as women Mātauranga Knowledge Mōteatea Laments Muka Stripped harakeke, phormium tenax Papahou Carved wooden rectangular-shaped container for special items Pākehā Person in NZ with European ancestry Pounamu Greenstone, jade Rangatahi Youth Raranga Weaving/textiles Tahua Roa Cloak display ceremony Taonga tuku iho Ancestral treasure Tapu Sacredness Te Reo Māori Māori language Tipuna ancestor. Waka huia Carved wooden oval-shaped container for special items Waka taua Large wooden-carved war canoes Whakapapa Genealogical ascent and descent Whakataukī Saying Whānau Family Whare whakairo Decorated meeting house Whenua Land, afterbirth

Notes 1 Cairns, “Decolonise of Indigenise: Moving Towards Sovereign Spaces and the Māorification of New Zealand Museology,” Te Papa Tongarewa (blog), February 10, 2020. https://blog.­ tepapa.govt.nz/2020/02/10/decolonise-or-indigenise-moving-towards-sovereign-spaces-and-the-­ maorification-of-new-zealand-museology/. 2 Moana Jackson, ‘In the End the Hope of Decolonisation,” Handbook of Indigenous Education, eds. E. A. McKinley and L. T. Smith (2018) (Singapore: Springer, 2018), 9. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-981-10-1839-8_59-1. 3 Moana Jackson, “In the End The Hope of Decolonisation,” in Handbook of Indigenous Education, ed. E. A. McKinley and L. T. Smith. 4 Later the kōauau was found around the neck of rangatira Tama Te Ururangi when he was killed in 1864; some years later, Murirangawhenua was given to Gilbert Mair, a colonial soldier/collector, who gave the kōauau to Auckland Museum. In 1993, Murirangawhenua was repatriated to Te Arawa. 5 Some publishers actively recruit Māori writers, such as Bridget Williams Books, Auckland University Press and Te Papa Press, who understand that a Māori audience for Māori writing is not only seen as desirable but is also achievable. 6 One of the current concerns for Māori in Aotearoa is the unwillingness for non-Māori to step back from being spokespeople or writers on Māori topics or issues. While some may have argued (in the 1990s!) that there was no one to do this ‘work,’ the situation is certainly different today. 7 A good start is to look at books and articles written by Māori, such as Awhina Tamarapa’s (2011) Kakahu Māori, Hirini Moko Mead’s (1995) Te Toi Whakairo and Ngahuia Te A ­ wekotuku’s (2007) Mau Moko. Even my own A Whakapapa of Tradition offers a range of translations for those interested in architecture. Check out also my entry on “Māori. Art and Architecture” for the Oxford Bibliographies of Art (Ellis (2018), and also Caroline Vercoe’s (2018) (Samoa) on “Contemporary Pacific Art.”).

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Ngarino Ellis 8 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonising Methodologies (Dunedin: Zed Books, 2012), 38. 9 This is a new direction for research and funding driven by renewed interest in embedding projects in Aotearoa New Zealand and focused on increasing a Māori-focus benefits. 10 Smith, Decolonising Methodologies, 128. 11 Calman, Ross, He Pukapuka Tataku i Nga Mahi a Te Rauparaha Nui/A Record of the Life of the Great Te Rauparaha (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2020), 147. 12 Henry Cooke, “Māori Party Co-Leader Rawiri Waititi Kicked Out of House for Refusal to Wear a Tie,” Stuff, February 9, 2021, https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300225643/ mori-party-coleader-rawiri-waititi-kicked-out-of-house-for-refusal-to-wear-a-tie. 13 See Ngarino Ellis, “Te Ao Hurihuri o Ngā Taonga Tuku Iho: The Evolving Worlds of our A ­ ncestral Treasures,” Biography 39, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 438–460. 14 In New Zealand, the Ministry of Education has deleted the Year 11 option for art history, and there are only three of the eight universities teaching the field. 15 Moana Jackson, “In the End,” 1.

Selected Bibliography Cairns, Puawai. “Decolonise of Indigenise: Moving Towards Sovereign Spaces and the Māorification of New Zealand Museology.” Te Papa Tongarewa (blog), February 10, 2020. https://blog.­ tepapa.govt.nz/2020/02/10/decolonise-or-indigenise-moving-towards-sovereign-spaces-and-the-­ maorification-of-new-zealand-museology/. Calman, Ross. He Pukapuka Tataku i Nga Mahi a Te Rauparaha Nui/A Record of the Life of the Great Te Rauparaha. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2020. Cooke, Henry. “Māori I Party Co-Leader Rawiri Waititi Kicked Out of House for Refusal to Wear a Tie.” Stuff, February 9, 2021. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300225643/ mori-party-coleader-rawiri-waititi-kicked-out-of-house-for-refusal-to-wear-a-tie. Ellis, Ngarino. “Te Ao Hurihuri o Ngā Taonga Tuku Iho: The Evolving Worlds of our Ancestral Treasures.” Biography 39, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 438–460. Ellis, Ngarino. A Whakapapa of Tradition: One Hundred Years of Ngāti Porou Carving 1830–1930. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2016. Ellis, Ngarino. “Māori Art and Architecture.” Oxford Bibliographies of Art. Last modified ­November 29, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/OBO/9780199920105-0133. Jackson M. “In the End the Hope of Decolonisation.” In Handbook of Indigenous Education, ­edited by E. McKinley and L. Smith. Singapore: Springer, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-981-10-1839-8_59-1. Mead, Hirini Moko. Te Toi Whakairo: The Art of Māori Carving. Auckland: Reed Publishing, 1995. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies. Dunedin: Zed Books, 2012. Tamarapa, Awhina. Whatu Kakahu: Māori Cloaks. Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2011. Te Awekotuku, Ngahuia. Mau Moko: The World of Māori Tattoo. Auckland: Penguin, 2007. Vercoe, Caroline. “Contemporary Pacific Art.” Oxford Bibliographies of Art. Last modified October 25, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/OBO/9780199920105-0132.

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3 REINVENTION AT THE WHEEL Shaping New Histories in the Decolonization of Disability Amanda Cachia

Born with one arm and no legs, African-American artist Shawanda Corbett, who hails from Mississippi, located on the Gulf Coast of the United States, questions the idea of a complete human body. Through an interdisciplinary practice comprised of painting, performance, dance, wearable architecture, poetry, and pottery, Corbett rejects the binaries of oppression between human/nonhuman and able-bodied/disabled, challenging instead definitions and boundaries around minority identity categories such as race, gender, and disability. Specifically, she draws on the construct of the cyborg and its theoretical feminist applications through scholars such as Donna Haraway to demonstrate how disability may be decolonized. The artist is also inspired by the speculative science fiction of Octavia Butler, histories of jazz, slavery, the gospel mime tradition of face painting in Black churches in the American South, and the language and movement of pottery to offer a powerful optic for the Black female disabled experience. Corbett’s work extends on the thinking of the Black, feminist disabled scholar Sami Schalk, and the practices of other contemporary black artists like Wangechi Mutu, who also use the cyborg as a trope to challenge borders. I argue that in Corbett’s improvised physical acts of throwing – and so reinventing – at the wheel, she shapes new literal and metaphorical worlds where gender, race, and disability seamlessly dissolve. Corbett is also contributing toward a rare intersectional conversation around gender, race, and disability in contemporary art praxis that aids in decolonizing art history itself, which has traditionally remained steeped in limited white male Eurocentric ableist paradigms. This chapter will review a series of Corbett’s works and consider how they contribute to forming new histories, both in disability culture and art history.

Impairing Colonization and Posthumanizing the Cyborg Disability studies is part of the rhetoric of decolonization given that, historically, imperialism imposed socially constructed hierarchies of bodies. Within a philosophical framework, colonialism is essentially a global politics of impairment. Its narrative regarding disability was that it was a condition steeped in disruption and a problem that needed to be corrected. Colonization of different world regions from 1492 through the nineteenth century brought about a crisis to local social orders, including in how embodiment had been previously 73

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valued within Indigenous and native cultures. New meaning and social hierarchies were, therefore, assigned to bodily difference, impairment, and ability. Disruptions to less antagonistic understandings of disability that were rooted in religious, cultural, village, or kin-based networks and livelihoods became common, and an emerging medical model took their place, exported from the culture of the colonizers. Indigenous knowledge about bodies was foreign, out-of-place, and erased by the new culture of thinking toward disabled bodies as being part of a constituency of lack.1 This rubbed up against more spiritualistic and shamanistic qualities that disabled bodies carried and held in ancient Indigenous cultures. Colonialism imposed a capitalist world system, dependent on natural resource extraction and the unspeakably cruel exploitation of people, which foregrounded productivity and labor, particularly through enslavement. Scholar Shaun Grech elaborates on this: The trafficking of slaves was an early example of the creation of the ‘ideal’ colonised body … slave traders would pay better prices for the stronger ‘able’ prototype … Disabled people were always worth less …Within this economisation of bodies, disability became an additional mark of difference between the colonised, imbuing the body with unprecedented abnormalities, opening it up as a spectacle of oddities. This encapsulated the coloniser’s anxieties, desires, tensions and recourse to fracturing the colonised body, dividing it to control and rule it better.2 If certain (disabled) bodies were unable to contribute to the demands of capitalist production, they were deemed unfit and worthless, therefore, putting into motion a hierarchy of embodiment. This hierarchy or dyad between so-called superior versus inferior bodies was reflected in museum displays. Museums became repositories of colonial conquests, hoarding vast collections of artefacts that were violently stolen from their countries and communities of origin. Around the same time that museums were being established throughout the West, disability was also emphasized through the presentation of atypical human bodies on display in live “freak” shows to entertain crowds in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Corbett follows a long line of contemporary artists who have begun to untangle and address the legacies of racism and colonialism as described above, and as eschewed in art history textbooks and the museum.3 These include Fred Wilson, Adrian Piper, Kehinde Wiley, and Kara Walker, among others. In particular, Yinka Shonibare addresses racist and colonialist histories through re-enacting scenes of British aristocracy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings by inserting his Black disabled body as the main protagonist in photographs instead of the eponymous white male, such as the suite Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998), although it is notably hard to discern Shonibare’s physically disabled body from the photographs. While Corbett is offering a Black disabled women’s perspective to these same legacies, her approach is less grounded in appropriations from colonial artistic legacies, looking instead to the stories and cultural influences from her own upbringing in the Deep South that incorporates both pleasurable and painful pasts. In her bid to question the nature of the so-called perfect or correct human body, Corbett has also found it useful to turn toward posthumanism and the figure of the cyborg. Wangechi Mutu, particularly, offers a template for how Black contemporary female artists deploy the cyborg in which to open up new worlds for bodies that are no longer constrained by the boundaries of oppressive and restrictive categories of otherness. In their introduction to the edited book ­Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader, Giovanni Aloi and Susan McHugh begin 74

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by stating that “posthumanism wrestles with emerging recognitions of the porousness of boundaries that mark the human condition.”4 Posthumanist thinking is an important instrument for contemporary artists to wield, as they “rethink human/nonhuman relations in the context of modern imperial histories of settler colonialism.”5 The posthuman is a response to the potential of technology, globalization, and extinction. Scholars in disability studies have turned to posthumanism, materialism, and biopolitics with greater fluency and consistency as a methodology in which to gain new ground. Rather than a disability studies tradition that is largely about exclusion and exposing human-made barriers, posthumanism offers new possibilities. In their introduction to The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect, editors David T. Mitchell, Susan Antebi, and Sharon L. Snyder argue that disability has an “ongoing potentiality to reshape the world.”6 Instead of fixing a problem as we typically see in the medical model of disability, a “posthumanist disability approach provides an opportunity to encounter disability more viscerally as an active participant in the transhistorical, intraspecies, and cross-cultural interactions of materiality, sociality, structures, and environments.”7 As they write, it is not just about looking at disability through positive and affirming terms; it is more about how disability makes evident embodiment’s tendency to shift and unfold. Disability makes tangible how the body morphs into new rearrangements and new form. Disability is “already a part of the process of materiality’s active, unfolding participation in the world.”8 As the body is not singular, disability cannot be reduced to a barometer of societal insufficiency. According to the authors, “Disability participates in this ‘complex elaboration of difference’ rather than solidifies something gone awry in an otherwise stable process. Embodiment’s defining precarity and surprising unfoldings turn disabilities into productive, proactive expressive capacities within matter itself”9 The social model of disability proposes that what makes someone disabled is not their medical condition but the attitudes and structures of society, but the scholars critique of the social model is that it leaves “little room for consideration of disability materiality as active, transformative, agential, and in many instances, under threat.”10 Shawanda Corbett takes an agential approach toward revealing how their bodies contribute to the shifting, evolving complexity of flesh by showcasing how bodies communicate in adaptable and inventive ways. As a precursor to Corbett’s cyborg work, Wangechi Mutu uses the medium of collage (often used by feminist artists going back to the 1970s such as Martha Rosler or, even earlier, by German Dadaists in the 1920s such as Hannah Höch) to piece together human, animal, and machine parts to critique idealized notions of the female body. Through the creation of these unique hybrid forms, Mutu’s characters become feminist cyborgs, and pose a reversal to the ways that African women have been subjugated by the power dynamics of colonization. Her work offers an important predecessor to the work of Corbett. In one of Mutu’s most iconic series of works, entitled Adult Female Sexual Organs (2005), the artist created powerful collaged mask-like portraits of Black women using fashion magazines, pornography, and found Victorian medical illustrations of female sexual organs being examined with various gynecological instruments such as a speculum. The portraits evoke Mutu’s own version of an aesthetics of traditional African masks and crafts, which oscillate between ancient and futuristic. Mutu attempts to unpack how colonial ideology has been freighted onto African women’s sexuality whilst also trying to empower them with new collaged forms that are seemingly boundless and hard to define. The cyborg is a metaphor for thinking about difference and for imagining new variations of the human free 75

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of repressive categories around race, gender, and disability. Mutu’s work clearly illustrates the theory of Donna Haraway in her iconic essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto” from 1985. Haraway’s text espouses the virtues and pleasures of confusing boundaries, fracturing identities, and imagining a world without gender. In the essay, Haraway says, Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other. The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities. In retelling origin stories, cyborg authors subvert the central myths of origin myths of Western culture.11 Mutu as an artist or “writer” of cyborg theory, therefore, displaces hierarchical dualisms and the myths manifested through colonialism. Collage becomes a powerful feminist and decolonial medium with which to animate Haraway’s cyborg theory. Corbett also acknowledges the import of Haraway’s work to her own practice, especially how the cyborg acts as a vehicle in which to move beyond the boundaries of the human body. She states, “I see being a cyborg as using anything mechanical to enhance one’s life – even just a pottery wheel.”12 I argue that Corbett extends and pushes both Haraway’s philosophy and Mutu’s illustrations by injecting a disability narrative into these frameworks: the cyborg is always already a disabled figure too, as it embodies qualities of fragmentation, splitting, and rupture. The cyborg throws constructs of normal and natural into question, much like the disabled body itself. Building on Haraway’s work, Black speculative fiction writer Octavia Butler offers a “literary-speculative theorization of the structure of settler colonialism,” especially through books such as Parable of the Sower (1993).13 The postapocalyptic novel follows the story of a 15-year-old protagonist Lauren Olamina in her search for freedom in California, amongst climate change and social inequalities. In their book, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, scholar Sami Schalk demonstrates how “black women’s speculative fiction has social and political importance because of how the texts shift our understanding of the meanings of and relationships between (dis)ability, race, and gender.”14 Black speculative fiction allows us to “imagine otherwise,” toward a future that is “away from oppression or in which relations between currently empowered and disempowered groups are altered or improved.”15 Schalk’s book is an important intervention in the field, because they are the first scholar to offer an account of the representation of disability in speculative fiction by black authors. Speculative fiction is a ripe and rich forum in which to imagine alternative futures for disabled people, as the medium itself is one that doesn’t follow the rules. What constitutes a race, gender, or disability no longer applies in the realm of speculative fiction, which is no doubt the reason for Corbett’s gravitation toward it as a genre of artistic influence. In the world of speculative fiction, Black disabled subjects are subjects, not objects. They are unhindered by the real world and confining representations. The cover of Schalk’s book features a collage of a cyborg by Tahir Carl Karmali. From the series 2014 Jua Kali, it is a hybrid of a Black woman intermingled with a machine-like dress, crown (or halo), and steel-feathered wings. Given that Corbett cites Donna Haraway, the cyborg, and Octavia Butler as influences, I now turn to consider how the cyborg is indeed made manifest as a vessel in her work in the next section, alongside the decidedly low-tech medium of clay.

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Vessels of Flesh and Clay According to writer Elizabeth Buhe, under Corbett’s artistic direction “the vessel is remarkably capacious as both a concept and a physical entity.”16 Corbett uses both flesh and clay to demonstrate the malleability of both. She has said, “terminology around disability or anything like that has such a heavy history to it. And it’s something that I don’t necessarily identify with. I would prefer to be called a cyborg.”17 The cyborg as a vessel is primarily present through Corbett’s performance-based work. In Corbett’s pottery-based practice, her physical adaptation and problem-solving of using the pottery wheel is also one that shows making and doing differently. Corbett has said that she also considers the wheel to be a cyborg-type vessel, given it is a machine to produce her artistic expression in clay. In the recent past, Corbett has executed two large pottery installations, the first entitled Neighbourhood Garden (2020), for Corvi-Mora gallery in ­London, and the second To the Fields of Lilac (2022) for Salon 94 gallery in New York. Corbett creates series of pots that she also considers as vessels for carrying messages of hope and resilience. They are also visual records or permanent imprints of her body engaging with the wet clay. Through Corbett’s inventive ways to create pots with the use of her one arm, she is literally “remoulding the parameters of ceramic art.”18 She has learned how to “wield the centripetal force of spinning ceramics to her benefit.”19 The artist has spoken of how she must endeavor to keep the muscles in her one arm working evenly as she might acquire an injury if she relies on only one approach. Therefore, she has a style that she describes as “hotch potch.”20 Corbett enjoys working with clay as she finds it to be a collaborative experience. Clay has a memory as one’s body joins with it and works with it at the wheel, and in Corbett’s execution of her sculptures, they offer clues of her atypical embodiment. One example is how the sculptures, with a “shared morphology” of three “bellies,” three “necks,” and a “foot,” also showcase a slight lean or a bend instead of being perfectly upright at a 90 degree vertical angle, as this is how Corbett’s body effectively executes the objects at the wheel with one arm.21 Buhe says that “the accident of tilt that Corbett courts in the firing process anthropomorphizes the vessels, attributing to them whatever personality traits one might associate with the bent human form.”22 The more natural, organic shapes are a powerful metaphor for the malleability of flesh. Corbett narrates, I relate to the medium of clay so much because people are the metaphor for malleability. We start in an original form, and because of life, time, and environments we are constantly changing, are in a constant state of undoing.23 Corbett is drawn to clay because it is limitless in its infinite possibilities for shaping and reshaping, just as the human body is also limitless for a full and great diversity of bodies. In more detail, in Corbett’s first installation, Neighbourhood Garden (2020), groupings of paintings and ceramics evoked memories of her neighborhoods from her childhood living in New York City and Mississippi. Corbett is attempting to reframe damaging racial and gender stereotypes in her ceramic vessels, as she elevates black, working-class individuals from within her communities through the medium of clay, including “Candy lady,” “Ole girl from down the street,” and “Basketball boys.” Coupled with the freedom of carving out new shape and form with the clay are the geometric patterns filled with gold and other vibrant, bright colors that the artist has painted onto their lustrous surfaces while she was listening and dancing to improvisational jazz from the likes of John Coltrane, Alice

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Coltrane, and Pharoah Sanders. Corbett believes that jazz is complex and involves skill to play well. Her love of jazz developed whilst listening to it frequently as a child growing up in Mississippi. Given the formative influence jazz has had in her life, she wanted to instill this into her art practice as well.24 Similarly, To the Fields of Lilac (2022) is also a “stereotype-free” gathering of anthropomorphic sculptures of different heights and shapes that also lean.25 The ceramics in this installation were also accompanied by colorful abstract paintings, although Corbett also included large-scale photographs of herself masked with the gestural lines of clay slip (instead of white mime paint as she has used for her performances). The clay slip, like the mime paint, gives the artist a kind of new anonymity and freedom to literally and metaphorically carve out new personas, characters, and definitions of embodiment of herself and those within her community, past and present. While the artist’s first installation represented specific individuals from her neighborhoods, in her second installation in New York, the artist sees her sculptures as a type of collective personality with shared traits.26 Buhe further states that “the new works seem to suggest a change in Corbett’s thinking to encompass also a history of Black experience in the United States.”27 Titles for these sculptures include familiar phrases, such as “Do you see what I see,” “Stop all that slouching, boy,” “Just the blind leading the blind,” and “Our freedom is not your absolute freedom.” Here, C ­ orbett’s vessels continue to take on metaphorical properties, but now, the metaphor relates to the history of slavery: the vessel can be equated to a ship which brought people across the Atlantic to slavery. The vessel is a literal and metaphorical carrier of water, bodies, and ultimately, offers a passage to freedom. In both installations, Corbett aids the viewer in imagining how these might be playful yet reverent substitutes for bodies by virtue of how she displays them in groupings on low-lying pedestals in the center of the gallery space. While the display is also purposefully made to be at a height accessible for people in wheelchairs (Corbett herself is a wheelchair user), the irregularly shaped arrangement of the pedestals is meant to force a navigation for a viewer that might be “akin to ambling through an unknown city or park.”28 Both installations also function as totemic and embody cultural influences from West African pottery (Figure 3.1). Corbett is especially informed by the work of Kenyan-born British artist Magdalene Odundo whom she first encountered in art school. While the history of ceramics was taught through a mostly white perspective, learning about Odundo provided a Black perspective of the medium that became critical to Corbett’s practice. In fact, Corbett calls her hand-building essentially West African. She shuns the stereotype that West African is primitive; on the flip side, scholars in sensorial studies have demonstrated how pottery-making traditions, amongst other mediums, have much to offer in the way of expanded sensory apprehension of our relations with objects. In the introduction to their book, Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, editors Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden and Ruth B. Phillips discuss how material cultures from outside the West offer a broader notion of embodiment which “refigures the relationships between our body, sensory perception, and cultural praxis.”29 In line with this thinking, Corbett’s physical engagement with the pottery wheel and the actions of her body in space as it moves in synthesis with matter reveals a unique and new phenomenological engagement that pushes definitions of the senses further and wider. This is reinforced by the work of scholars Kathryn Linn Guerts and Elvis Gershon Adikah, who specifically speak of the transformation of material culture in West Africa. They talk of how in Anlo-Ewe society, there is a local term called “seselelame” which means “feeling in the body, flesh, or skin,” 78

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Figure 3.1  Installation view, Shawanda Corbett, To the Fields of Lilac, 2022.  Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

and this term was important to understanding how West African culture expanded the traditional distinctive domains of the senses in Western culture.30 “Seselelame” also references the feeling of embodied intersubjectivity. The authors propose that utilitarian objects from precolonial times (such as earthenware pots, straw mattresses, and hand-woven cloth) offered this feeling of “seselelame” when there was an embodied exchange with these objects. They give the example of how a sense of balance is achieved when one drinks out of a bowl or cup with two hands, deriving deep satisfaction through this embodied intersubjectivity of agents. The example of balance provides a concrete expression for this deeper sensation of “seselelame.” The example that the authors provide is tied up in how the feeling of two hands helps to achieve balance and ultimately “seselelame” but here, I argue that Corbett is pushing the tradition of “seselelame” even more deeply, finding balance too within her own unique body as it pushes and moulds clay form with one arm and one hand. Corbett is also finding “seselelame” through proprioceptive relations with material objects, deriving deep satisfaction in discovering new shapes and forms, akin to the freedom found within the cyborg. As Corbett’s flesh and clay commingle, the concept and metaphor of the vessel does much work in offering rich and generative understandings of embodiment, drawing on associations from precolonial histories to broaden our perspectives. Turning to Corbett’s performance work now, in 2019, the artist was invited to present Blackbird in Mississippi for Serpentine Park Night at the Serpentine Galleries in London. In a riveting performance accompanied by several musicians including a violinist and choral 79

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singers, Corbett, her face painted white and wearing a simple white gown, became a science fiction character named haar wese, who time-travels back through the history of AfricanAmerican culture in the American South. The artist powerfully uses the metaphor of a fugitive’s voyages on the underground railroad to animate her own journey travelling from Mississippi to Rochester in New York to undertake physical rehabilitation for her disability. In the performance, haar wese finds their voice and their own unique and empowered placement within an environment of great displacement. As Corbett slowly rotates, spins and topples across the floor, with the use of her one arm, we are offered a moment in which story-telling is indeed told through an unconventional armature of flesh, and moves from subordination to poetic transgression. In the performance, Corbett applies a white mask in the tradition of gospel mime face painting in Black churches in the American South. Mime has been utilized as an art form in silent movies, street performance, and circus clowns in the past century, and it eventually evolved into an evangelistic tool. Audible items such as songs, prayers, and sermons bring these to life in a striking visual form.31 The origins of mime go even further back, to the times of the ancient Greeks who used masks in theatrical productions to convey emotion through the body rather than simply facial expression alone. Whilst the mime performers in Black churches are performing – or preaching – words from the gospel, Corbett uses the face paint as a means in which to evoke her own private language of difference. Additionally, I argue that the face paint is a visual aid that helps to transport Corbett from the human world into a posthumanist one, and enlivens Corbett as a new or alternative character (cyborg or enslaved woman), away from hardened definitions and categories. Indeed, this parallels the very origins of mime artistry and Greek masks, as they offered a freedom to perform under new embodied contexts and frameworks. Freedom as an overarching theme in Corbett’s work is important on multiple levels: first, Corbett draws on the freedom encapsulated by cyborgs and Black speculative fiction in which to move beyond society’s ableist definitions of complete bodies that have personal resonance for her own embodiment. The artist pronounces, “freedom is about self-love. It’s always pushing up against what socially you are expected to do, be, or say … Underneath a lot of my work … is freedom as a love story to yourself.”32 Second, Corbett’s analogous comparison with accounts of slavery as tied up in the legacies of colonialism and capitalism also hinge on the desire for emancipation. Corporal violence on captive slaves meant that disability and colonialism fused together in the act of deforming and disfiguring imprisoned bodies. The scarred unfree body of colonization was impaired by punishment, and the maimed body was used as a threat, and to wield subordination. Through Corbett’s performance-based work, such as Blackbird in Mississippi, the artist turns her body into a vessel to simultaneously tell and disavow the legacies of racism and colonialism from her histories, whilst using her body as an instrument to tell the story differently, both physically and metaphorically.

Conclusion: Decolonizing, Decentering, and Firing Shawanda Corbett reinvents and expresses ideas and themes of Black history and culture, sexuality, gender, and body politics in exciting and complex new ways. By drawing in many different artistic, methodological, and cultural influences, in synthesis with her own flesh and the medium of clay as vessels, she offers us powerful images with which to imagine

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alternatives to race, gender, and disability, whilst also offering insight into how these identity categories productively intersect in contemporary art. Corbett’s ceramic sculptures, paintings, photographs, and performances build a new visual language and a new history that aids in decolonizing and decentering problematic racist and ableist stereotypes and histories. Within the literal firing process of making the clay sculptures, the artist also symbolically fires a flame of illuminating new worlds, much like the function of mime performance, black speculative fiction, posthumanism, and the cyborg, where bodies like hers are free from the limited definitions shaped by capitalism and colonialism. Corbett’s work remains an insightful indicator for the critical directions and trends that contemporary artists are taking in the future toward the ambitious project of decolonization, where a plethora of influences are mined to create a profound new art historical discourse in images and in sense in equal measure.

Notes 1 Raewyn Connell, “Southern Bodies and Disability: Re-thinking Concepts,” Third World ­Quarterly, 32, no. 8 (2011): 1369–1381. 2 Shaun Grech, “Decolonising Eurocentric Disability Studies: Why Colonialism Matters in the ­Disability and Global South Debate,” Social Identities, 21, no. 1 (2015): 6–21. 3 In Tobin Siebers book Disability Aesthetics (2010), he grounds his argument around how the representation of disability has always already been present in art history that has never been acknowledged or explored in any serious way by art historians. In Ann Millett-Gallant’s book The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art (2012), the scholar analyzes images of the body in visual culture and juxtaposes non-disabled and disabled artists and artwork side by side to generate new dialogue, but there are few other texts that do this work. 4 Giovanni Aloi and Susan McHugh (eds.) “Introduction,” Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 1. 5 Ibid., 6. 6 David T. Mitchell, Susan Antebi, and Sharon L. Snyder, “Introduction,” The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect, edited by David T. Mitchell, Susan Antebi, and Sharon L. Snyder (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2019), 2. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth-Century,” Socialist Review, 80 (1985): 65–108. 12 Isabella Smith, “Shawanda Corbett Combines Pottery, Performance and Personalities,” Crafts Council UK Stories, June 12, 2020, https://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/stories/ceramic-artist-­ shawanda-corbett-giving-clay-character. Accessed March 31, 2022. 13 Smaran Dayal, “Octavia Butler and the Settler Colonial Speculative: Xenogenesis and Planetary Loss,” American Studies, 60, nos. 3–4 (2021): 95–118. 14 Sami Schalk, “Introduction,” Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kindle Edition, 2017), 33. 15 Ibid., 10. 16 Elizabeth Buhe, “Shawanda Corbett: To the Fields of Lilac,” The Brooklyn Rail, February 2022, https://brooklynrail.org/2022/02/artseen/Shawanda-Corbett-To-the-Fields-of-Lilac. Accessed April 6, 2022. 17 Harriet Lloyd-Smith, “Shawanda Corbett on Breaking the Mould of Ceramic Art,” Wallpaper, March 2022, https://www.wallpaper.com/art/shawanda-corbett-artist-profile. Accessed April 1, 2022. 18 Ibid.

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Buhe, “Shawanda Corbett: To the Fields of Lilac.” Lloyd-Smith, “Shawanda Corbett on Breaking the Mould of Ceramic Art.” Buhe, “Shawanda Corbett: To the Fields of Lilac.” Ibid. Shawanda Corbett interviewed by Jareh Des, “Metaphors of Malleability,” BOMB, July 20, 2020, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/metaphors-of-malleability-shawanda-corbett-­interviewed/. ­Accessed April 1, 2022. 24 Harriet Lloyd-Smith, “Shawanda Corbett on Breaking the Mould of Ceramic Art.” 25 Ibid. 26 Buhe, “Shawanda Corbett: To the Fields of Lilac.” 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden and Ruth B. Phillips, “Introduction.” Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, edited by Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth B. Phillips (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), 1–31. 30 Kathryn Linn Guerts and Elvis Gershon Adikah, “Enduring and Endearing Feelings and the Transformation of Material Culture in West Africa,” Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, 35–60. 31 Christopher Bailey, “The History of Mime and Drama,” Perfecting the Art of Mime and Drama, self-published book, 2022. 32 Lloyd-Smith, “Shawanda Corbett on Breaking the Mould of Ceramic Art.”

Selected Bibliography Aloi, Giovanni, and Susan McHugh. “Introduction.” Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader. Edited by Giovanni Aloi and Susan McHugh. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Bailey, Christopher. “The History of Mime and Drama.” Perfecting the Art of Mime and Drama. Self-published book, 2022. Buhe, Elizabeth. “Shawanda Corbett: To the Fields of Lilac.” The Brooklyn Rail, February 2022, https://brooklynrail.org/2022/02/artseen/Shawanda-Corbett-To-the-Fields-of-Lilac. Accessed April 6, 2022. Connell, Raewyn. “Southern Bodies and Disability: Re-Thinking Concepts.” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 8, 2011, 1369–1381. Edwards, Elizabeth, Chris Gosden, and Ruth B. Phillips. “Introduction.” Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, edited by Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth B. Phillips, 1–31. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006. Dayal, Smaran. “Octavia Butler and the Settler Colonial Speculative: Xenogenesis and Planetary Loss.” American Studies, Vol. 60, No. 3–4, 2021, 95–118. Des, Jareh. Interview with Shawanda Corbett. “Metaphors of Malleability.” BOMB, July 20, 2020. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/metaphors-of-malleability-shawanda-corbett-interviewed/. ­Accessed April 1, 2022. Grech, Shaun. “Decolonising Eurocentric Disability Studies: Why Colonialism Matters in the Disability and Global South Debate.” Social Identities, Vol. 21, No. 1, 2015, 6–21. Guerts, Kathryn Linn, and Elvis Gershon Adikah. “Enduring and Endearing Feelings and the Transformation of Material Culture in West Africa.” In Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, edited by Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth B. Phillips, 35–60. ­Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth-Century.” Socialist Review, Vol. 80, 1985, 65–108. Lloyd-Smith, Harriet. “Shawanda Corbett on Breaking the Mould of Ceramic Art.” Wallpaper, March 2022. https://www.wallpaper.com/art/shawanda-corbett-­artist-profile. Accessed April 1, 2022. Mitchell, David T., Susan Antebi, and Sharon L. Snyder, eds. The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of M ­ ichigan Press, 2019.

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Shaping New Histories in the Decolonization of Disability Schalk, Sami. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and ­Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Smith, ­Isabella. “Shawanda Corbett Combines Pottery, Performance and Personalities.” Crafts Council UK ­Stories, June 12, 2020, https://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/stories/ceramic-artist-shawandacorbett-­giving-clay-character. Accessed March 31, 2022.

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4 THE POWER OF ABSENCE An Interview with Ken Gonzales-Day Tatiana Flores

Tatiana Flores I’d like to begin with issues from my own research in regards to how they may relate to your photography and art practice. I’ll confess that I’ve been inciting controversy by asking questions around Latinidad and race.1 I’ve found through my work on the Caribbean that when Blackness is foregrounded, Indigeneity is forgotten. Or vice versa, when Indigeneity is the focus, Blackness is erased. Making this observation, however, might risk sounding like an accusation. And, as we know, the celebration of mixedness (mestizaje) in Latin Americanist and Latinx discourse is also implying Black and Indigenous erasure. As mestizes ourselves, you and I might be in an awkward position in asking or critiquing questions around race and representation, to the degree of potentially being accused of appropriation or epistemic extractivism. But you have been asking them over the course of your entire career. What I find so powerful about your work is the foregrounding of race in a manner that is so sensitive and inclusive. Have you ever had to defend your practice around any particular charge?

Ken Gonzales-Day In terms of thinking about my practice, many people are familiar with my work about the erasure of content from an archival historic image, as in the Erased Lynching series (2002–present), where I erase the victim from the photograph and then re-present the new version. So from the get-go, the question of appropriation—cultural appropriation, artistic appropriation—are connected. In other words, if I am referencing work from a specific community in order to try to raise awareness about that community and its history, the question is: does everything become an act of cultural appropriation, or can we create a third space for critical engagement?2 When we think about the Pictures Generation and the use of appropriated images, the idea was to take the image out of its original context and create a new critical context or critical framework for rethinking that original moment. That’s the whole idea of really the last 50 years of art making, from Pop Art to whatever. We might as well go further back

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to Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907), which I often teach as a sort of ground zero. Alfred Barr made it into the flagship of the Museum of Modern Art collection, informing the public’s understanding of what modern art will be. How does Picasso’s use of, let’s call it “found imagery,” differ from my own or that of any other contemporary artist? How do we reclaim or maintain the notion of appropriation as a critical practice? Where is the criticality in my or others’ practice, and how do we know? How is it recognizable to the viewer as a critical practice? How might they uncover that, given the challenge of having elements erased or altered? And does one have the right, does anyone have the right to speak of another’s practice? Or another’s culture? These are some of the issues that my work raises.

TF How do you navigate these layers from the perspective of your mestizo identity?

KGD Like many Mexican-Americans in the United States and across the Southwest, I have ancestors from Northwestern and Southern Europe and Indigenous ancestors from North America. Given my mixed ancestry, I have no place from which to speak because I’m not a 100% of anything. My parents were married in the sixties, and so they were a mixed-race couple in the U.S. normative imaginary. They sometimes experienced discomfort, social discomfort, and difficulty in celebrating their love. I have a brother, so my brother and I are the product of that love. I like to emphasize that because at times, from a certain ideological perspective, critics would like to split me in half. Well, it doesn’t work that way. I am all of these things, as so many of us are.

TF It sounds as though the intertwined questions of representation and ethnicity have formed you both as an artist and as a human.

KGD We have all inherited cultural frameworks from others. The question of culture versus biology, versus genomes, or who has the right to speak, and how much of a DNA strand is linked to a specific place can be difficult to disentangle. We can also think about the different ways that we understand culture. There is no easy return to a pre-contact state, nor do I believe that, in most cases, any of us really want that—we’re not going to throw away our computers! From a perspective that values purity, there are individuals who choose to see my work as being without value and see all that I represent as part of the problem. And that problem for them is often signaled by my appearance, by my speaking voice, or by my academic standing as a professor. So those are the three areas that I often get challenged on. I do think these are, or can be, reasonable questions for someone encountering me, or someone like me, in a context in which they’re being exposed to new information and new ideas around identity. They want to know, who are you, and how do you relate to my history and my narrative? I feel like, to be questioned is part of the critical engagement that I invite in my work and scholarship. 85

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It’s also important to point out that I’m queer. I came out during the height of the AIDS pandemic and survived but lost friends. I lived at a time when the question of identifying oneself as queer was to risk quite a lot—in the beginning, people lost jobs and social standing. In the 1980s, conversations around the politics of race and colonialism did not always include sexual or gender identity, but my early work looked at the Two-Spirit cultural traditions in the Southwest as a model to counter the European, Greco-Roman, and Western notions of queerness. So, I see that as an added layer in my own experience of intersectionality.

TF In terms of relating some of these observations to your practice, what body of work would you signal to express the convergence of these multiple ideas?

KGD The best place to begin is the Profiled series, which I developed after I had first exhibited the Erased Lynchings. I was invited to be a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute in 2008. The project that I set for myself was to photograph every bust in the J. Paul Getty Museum collection as a way of thinking about who was represented. The Getty Center had been opened for a decade, but it was controversial for its design and its extravagant hillside location, akin to a modern-day Acropolis. The collection housed there is of European painting, sculpture, and decorative arts. I was really interested in that as a starting point for an artistic project. Of course, I could have simply gone to the digital catalog and printed everything out. One could argue that there was no need to photograph the art objects themselves, but my practice has been, in part, to see the camera as witness. I set out to find each object and to photograph it where I could. In some cases, they were in vitrines or behind glass, and, well, that’s what I photographed. In the end, I had a series of images which were meant to tell me about the diversity of the collection. And, as you well know, there are no Latinx busts in that collection. I was photographing sculptural works, not painted works—three-dimensional objects that stood in for real bodies. In the final compositions, I posed the sculptures in dialogue across a horizontal expanse to create a new kind of space. The idea of absence that had been represented by the erasure of the victim in the Erased Lynching series now became the absence represented by each three-dimensional sculpture. The bust is, after all, an absence that is constructed to stand in for the missing person. It is a human presence that is both physical and absent at the same time. I guess you might think of it as a data set, an equation, that goes something like, this plus this equals that. And that was the idea of putting the figures together and in dialogue. A lot of viewers see the two figures, either the one with two males looking at each other in profile, or the companion piece with the two women, as being simply about race or racial formation. But these were created at a time when same-sex marriage was banned under California’s Proposition 8. I think for me, the work was about the possibility that there were all kinds of unknown elements in the relationship between these pairs of figures, and I wanted that ambiguity to engage on a wide range of levels. In art, unlike a math equation, there is no right answer. There was the answer I hoped for, in terms of the kinds of responses that people might have, but once you make a work, it is interpreted in different ways and also interpreted differently over time. The meaning changes, and I think that’s part of the power of art. 86

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TF The photographs from the Profiled series have been on billboards and out in urban space. And they’ve also been printed smaller and shown as part of gallery exhibitions. I remember seeing one of them in Unseen, the two-person exhibition of you and Titus Kaphar curated by Taína Caragol and Asma Naeem for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, in 2018. What has the response been between that sort of massive viewership, and then the more rarified context of the gallery or museum?

KGD Initially, they were created specifically for billboards, which is why they have that format. I proposed two, but they only picked one (see Figure 4.1). The one of the two women which you saw in Unseen was the alternate, but I did eventually get to exhibit it billboard size at The Bass in Miami. The idea was to take this collection from the Getty that was very rarified, in a place that people had difficulty getting to, and bring the objects out and put them on the street where everybody could see them. I heard that something like six million people saw that first billboard, which was placed in the mid-Wilshire area, just by driving in Los Angeles. Of course, the average gallery exhibition might bring in 300 people. Really, I don’t know how many, it depends on whether it is a university gallery, a commercial gallery, a large or small museum. But the scale of public art is really different. The intentionality is different as well. When you’re going to a museum, you’re expecting that art experience, and

Figure 4.1  Ken Gonzales-Day, Untitled (Antico [Pier Jacopo Alari-Bonacolsi], Bust of a Young Man and Francis Harwood, Bust of a Man, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), 2010, Commission by the MAK Center, West Hollywood, CA, for the citywide exhibition How Many Billboards, 2010.  Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

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you have a set of cultural guidelines. When you’re driving down the street, you’re g­ etting to work, you need your coffee, you’re doing other kinds of things in your life. And this artwork appears on the edge of your periphery. It’s a very different experience. We had a website where people could type in an address and find out information on the work and the show and all of the things connected to it. I had emails from people that would drive by and see it. They’d actually pull over, write to me to ask, what is this about, what’s going on here? It opened up a discursive space for them. This from a medium that was originally intended to sell a product or do a specific thing; the billboards generated something new, introduced an idea that viewers had not been thinking about prior to that. And that is part of how I might define an artwork. What is art? How do we know it’s art? The message was open-ended. There was a lot of room for interpretation and reinterpretation. I don’t know if I would call it a liminal space, but a space of intersectionality—quite literally given the urban location, between commute, art museum, artistic practice, curatorial practice, and community partnership.

TF In addition to the important conversations around the topic of representation that your work incites, I also note a tendency towards mapping. Could you talk to me about mapping in your practice—how it came about and how it relates to the broader themes of your art?

KGD A good starting place would be to say that the first adventure into mapping took place with the series Searching for California Hang Trees (2002–ongoing), in which I tried to track down locations where individuals had been lynched in the state of California.3 I had driven up and down the state looking, which I realized very few people can do, and no one had ever done before me as far as I know. I also made a walking tour map for downtown lynching sites in Los Angeles for my students. They could take the train (from Scripps College) to Union Station and walk around the neighborhood and find the locations.4 The idea was to give someone who was interested in Californians of the past, and particularly Latinos— because there are no markers or memorials of this history in downtown—the mapmaking project was meant to allow the individual who might go on the tour, a chance to experience some of what I experienced in uncovering these locations. You stand at an intersection and there are no trees, there’s nothing to see. And you’re just standing there, around people, and all of the craziness of an urban street, and taking a moment to think about what transpired there. And so that was, I think, the first detailed map I made. I often ask myself, how is it that I could be the first one to have ever done this? I had to do a lot of primary research. I read through all the newspapers I could find from 1849 to 1879 (on microfilm), something like that, for LA, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Diego, and a few other cities and then created a case list of California lynchings. The records would often say something like, this person was hanged, at so and so’s corral gate. Then I would go back to the property records I found through old maps like the Sanborn maps, which were insurance maps that were used to insure private property that date back to the 1880s in the LA area.5 From there, I could figure out where was that property and where was the gate entrance. Using GIS technology, I would create a layered map, which would have different years up to the present. And I could layer those so that I could see 88

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where that corral gate had been. And then, I would put that point on my map for the walking tour. As a result, the sites can be quite precise, and, as important as that may be, it’s gotten almost no attention, from the city or state government officials. The tour is on my webpage, but, you know, at some point I won’t be here, or not aboveground, and then what happens to all that history? So yes, that was the initial impulse to try to record a history that has gone unrecorded. And the absence of that record has implications for all Latinxs. These histories, as we well know, date back to conquest and to the arrival of some of our ancestors from Mexico and Spain and wherever else they arrived from. Part of it is about the invisibility or erasure of Latinxs from the landscape and trying to first uncover that history, because there is no place to look, no book to go buy, nothing to download, so creating that history, and then as an artist, figuring out how I’m going to represent that visually. They’re both related: research is a part of art making, but then art is often a visual experience. In this case, it can also be experiential. For me, walking on that tour—the experience of seeing, experiencing, and being transformed—is the artwork.

TF Let’s linger here because what you said overall is just extraordinary. I’m still wrapping my head around the amount of labor, the shock, the sorrow. How many trees did you locate? As much as I am keenly aware that quantification can be another form of dehumanization, being able to enumerate these events signals a level of commitment on your part to finding these sites, to tell a history of the landscape that is not inscribed anywhere, and to begin a long overdue process of commemoration.

KGD As a preface, the series is called Searching for California Hang Trees, not “Finding ­California Hang Trees” (see Figure 4.2). It is an important distinction, and we know from conceptual art that naming or constructing a conceptual space is essential to creating the work. I created a container, if you will, a conceptual container in which to place these events. I compiled the case list, which became the basis for my book Lynching in the West. It was the first to identify over 354 cases of lynching for the state of California. Others have added to and expanded that research, and I continue to do so as well. But I think it’s important to say that if I did anything in this lifetime, that’s one contribution I am proud of. I told the story of various forces that created that history. The second part was to identify where those events happened. In some cases, I have very detailed information and in others, they’re approximate. Hence, the addition of “searching for …” I would go look for sites and still have more to go. Once I got there, I would take the data I had, whatever I had. For example, the document might specify a tree “a hundred yards from the Sheriff’s office.” Well, I would find out where the old Sheriff’s station was— often they’re still in the same place—and then wander about. I also identified what kind of trees they used. The California native oak or live oak was the most popular, and they grow very slow. If I could find a tree that was big enough, it had to be from that period. So I would just go and look. I wasn’t ever expecting to find anything, and that’s how it started. It was really more of a performative thing about looking, and mourning, more than anything else. I never thought of it as a documentary project, and I still don’t. 89

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Figure 4.2  Ken Gonzales-Day, Nightfall, 2006. 60 × 75 in. (152.4 x 190.5 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

I also drove to many sites and did not take a picture. Often, after a lynching, what they would do was chop down the tree after the mob had lynched these individuals (see Figure 4.3). In California, the victims were of all races: African-American, Chinese, Native American, white, Latinx, and, actually, Europeans as well: Italians, Swiss, and French immigrants who may have just arrived and retained their national identity. The perpetrators would take bits of the tree and the rope and sell them as mementos. Generally speaking, the trees had to be cut down at some point because otherwise people just fetishized them too much. Some trees actually survived but fell down later. I’ve found archival images of trees from the forties and fifties, but they’re no longer there. In those cases, I would go to the intersection. I know where many of the sites were, but when we talk about actual trees— there’s only a handful of them left. There were a few times when I was up in Sacramento, which is about a day’s drive from Los Angeles, when I basically just broke down at the microfilm reader. I would realize that the locations I was reading about were really close, and that’s how it started. Being a photographer, I already had my camera with me, just a small 35-millimeter ­camera at the time. After that trip, I went on eBay and bought a Deardorff camera, which is the old 8 by 10 inch wooden-view camera, not unlike the ones used by artists like ­Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. That was the point at which it went from research to becoming an art practice. 90

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Figure 4.3 Disguised Bandit,’ Lynching of Unidentified Man, n.d., US/Mexico border from the series Erased Lynching, 2006. Digital pigment print. 68 × 40 in. (177.7 x 101.6 cm). Courtesy of the Artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

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TF Florencia San Martín, one of our volume’s co-editors, has a photo background. I was telling her that we were going to do this interview today, and she asked me to ask you about technique, particularly around the trees. She’s interested in the exposure of some of the trees, as they look so mysterious, and how you decided on what approach you took to these photographs.

KGD The Deardorff camera has a wooden frame and is not very precise. They are hard to work with. You must load the film in total darkness. I would carry these giant film holders in a backpack and also had to bring along a cooler with ice since I was shooting in California so that the film would not overheat. At the time I had a Toyota Forerunner. I would put plastic bags over the windows on the inside to make it like a rolling darkroom, which got incredibly hot. I would have to take the piece of film and slide it in the film holder. Sometimes my fingers would get sweaty and stick to the film. When I came out of the SUV I would be drenched, and people driving by would look at me strangely and I wondered if they thought there were bodies inside! One holder allows for two pieces of film, so I could only capture 10 or 12 shots a day. I was dragging a backpack with these big holders, plus the camera and the tripod, and hiking to wherever I was going to, and then setting it all up and hiking all the way back, so it was a slow process. Adding to the challenges, the lenses are fixed, which means they are heavy, and I had a few to choose from. You have the lens on the front, and then you adjust the bellows at both the front and the back. You have what’s called the tilt-shift, which basically allows you to focus and to establish where the focal plane is going to be. And then there’s the variability of the lighting. In some cases, I could wait a day, but I couldn’t really wait forever because I had to go back to teaching at Scripps or return to LA. A lot of the decisions had to be made in the moment. The choice to work with the 8 × 10 film was a conscious attempt to contest the notion of the California landscape as empty space, which is what we sort of learned from Adams and Weston. I wanted the project to be about all the histories we can’t see. In the last few years, I’ve shifted to a digital camera. The 8 × 10 sheets have become difficult to develop and to find. But all those early images were on film. I wanted to see if I could make a project that would be a landscape project but that would turn landscape photography on its head. I sought to create something that would actually speak about the people who are not there anymore, to speak about a past that is not visible, to speak about the passage of time, to speak about the trees as witness, to think about the land as witness, to think about the memory of the land, and to think about our own relationship to the land.

TF In your recent work, you are continuing to think about landscape—as representation, as backdrop, and as witness—but now in the medium of drawing. How did that come about?

KGD I was invited by the Journal of the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution to propose a project using the collection as a way of raising awareness of this amazing 92

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resource that is available to artists and scholars. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I  couldn’t go do my research in person, so the process involved searching in the online database and sending e-mails to staff to ask them to pull and photograph materials for me whenever they could actually get back onsite. Through this research, I uncovered documentation from the first anti-lynching exhibition in the United States from 1935, which was held in New York. It was organized by the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]—and curated by Walter White, who was then the acting secretary.6 The first version was canceled because of the scandal around lynching, but a second version was mounted. I am trying to reconstruct the images from the checklist from that important show, as there was no catalog or much detailed information on it. The names on the checklist are largely known, but the images that correspond to each artist’s contribution are not. It pleased me to locate other artists who were willing to take on this issue, as far back as the 1920s. It amounts to almost a century of effort to try to create an anti-lynching law in the United States, which finally happened in 2022 after many failed attempts.7 As far as I can tell, all or nearly all the works are representations of lynchings of African-Americans. As I was thinking about how to respond to them, I found notable that each artist represented the landscape in a different way. Working on this project remotely led me to return to the medium of drawing (see Figure 4.4). They are drawings of photographs of the works in the exhibition. As in the Erased Lynching series, I removed the

Figure 4.4  Ken Gonzales-Day, Untitled (After Hale Woodruff, Giddap, 1935), 2021. Archival ink and pencil on Arches BFK Rives. 15 × 11 in. (38.1 × 27.9 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

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body and the rope, but this time, I also erased the crowd. These drawings, then, are focusing on the landscape and the land. Removing the mob allowed me to focus on the natural and built environment as rendered by the artist and to think about how the artists back then understood space and in particular these spaces. I redrew each branch and tree, and for me this practice brought back the performative sense of trying to understand how they felt in their time and how I feel now. The process of redrawing their line is not tracing exactly. I’m drawing and redrawing on top of the redrawing. The end version is a drawing with pencil on paper. The series reveals then that some of these landscapes are very haunted, some are very convoluted, some are beautiful, some are entangled. Some of the lines are very jagged and sharp. Through this experience, I was trying to understand their process.

TF Your evocation of performative brings us back to some of the discussions from the beginning, on the artist’s agency, especially around work that, in invoking the copy, might read as appropriation.

KGD When we think about an archive or a map or an artwork, we have to remember that somebody made it. How do we think, then, about the agency of the artist or the individual or even the scholar? From my perspective, I cannot separate the performative from the process. Coming up as an artist when I did, what was being celebrated in art school was conceptual art and performances of artists like Vito Acconci, Linda Montano, and Annie Sprinkle. I remember thinking at the time, that there were no Latinos in the conversation, no reference to the kinds of topics I was interested in. And yet these artists were very much using their subjective experiences, and their subjectivity was seen as universal. Their whiteness spoke to everyone. But I would often get people saying to me, well, I don’t know what you’re talking about. When I was in the Whitney Independent Study Program, a well-known art critic approached a piece I had made and said, he had never been in an adobe, so he couldn’t speak to my work. I had an M.A. in Art History from Hunter College/CUNY and had done all of my undergraduate training in New York, and my work was still not seen to resonate. As a result, I have had to create my own archives: to gather the research because no one else was doing it. And from there to create the art object. It’s not unlike other artists who go collect the mineral, grind it, make the pigment, and then produce the painting. All of those things are part of the artistic process. For me, the question of the embodied remains central. I embody this narrative, and the narrative is embodied in me, through my cultural, personal, subjective, historical, context; through my intersectionality.

Notes 1 See Tatiana Flores, “‘Latinidad Is Cancelled’: Confronting an Anti-Black Construct,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 3, no. 3 (July 2021): 58–79. 2 See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 52–57. 3 In addition to the series of photographs created around this topic, the artist also published a book around his research. See Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West, 1850–1935 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006).

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The Power of Absence: An Interview with Ken Gonzales-Day 4 url: https://kengonzalesday.com/events/los-angeles-lynching-sites-walking-tour/ 5 See Sanborn Maps Collection, Library of Congress, url: https://www.loc.gov/collections/ sanborn-maps/about-this-collection/. 6 See Walter White, “I Investigate Lynchings,” American Mercury (January 1929), reprinted in National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox, The Making of African-American Identity, v. III, 1917–1968. Accessed July 14, 2023, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/segregation/ text2/investigatelynchings.pdf. 7 The Emmett Till Antilynching Act became U.S. law on March 29, 2022.

Selected Bibliography Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Flores, Tatiana. “‘Latinidad Is Cancelled’: Confronting an Anti-Black Construct,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 3, no. 3 (July 2021): 58–79. Gonzales-Day, Ken. Lynching in the West, 1850–1935. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006. Gonzales-Day, Ken. “Walking Tour: Los Angeles Lynching Sites”. Ken Gonzales-Day. Accessed December 29, 2021, https://kengonzalesday.com/events/los-angeles-lynching-sites-walking-tour/ Sanborn Maps. Collection. Library of Congress, Washington DC. Accessed December 29, 2022, https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/about-this-collection/. White, Walter. “I Investigate Lynchings,” American Mercury (January 1929), reprinted in National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox, The Making of African-American Identity, v. III, 1917– 1968. Accessed July 14, 2023, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/segregation/text2/ investigatelynchings.pdf

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5 ART IN PARADISE FOUND AND LOST LeGrace Benson

An ecological view of the long history of visual arts of Haiti makes apparent the intricate diversity of colonization and decolonization as conditions of creation and diffusion. Three moments with distinctive ecological conditions and distinctive relationships with environments beyond the artists’ locale are particularly instructive: the Taino artists prior to the Columbian incursion; the Kreyòl artists at the Centre d’Art in mid-twentieth century; and the Atis Rezistans of Grand Rue beginning in 2010.1 Like games and theater, the visual arts are human-devised econiches nested within their encompassing ecosystems, in turn nested in the pan-terrestrial and cosmological environment. The ecological approach draws attention to productive aspects of the artists, the inventions and their reiterations that often go missing in discussions of ideas, images, and relative sales value. The focus here is on the artists’ relationship with the material and social environment, especially the agonic twins of colonization and decolonization. Of particular interest are the silent visual works, created out of the matrix of social relationships, the economy, dominant and sub-rosa religions, manners, old stories and instructions, ways of healing, ways of grieving. The resulting works range from those strongly ruled and those that escape rules. The escapees sometimes are visible, tangible ways to preserve and sometimes to expand the intangible territory of human comprehension of what it is to be here, now. In Ayiti-Kiskeya-Saint Domingue-Haiti, as in most societies, the range of possibilities afforded by that unique place and its succession of happenings are in action. Whether alone or in collaborative groups, artists venture into new materials and tools, new ways to manipulate them, novel insights into lived life arising out of an always labile environment, shaping, and being shaped. This is equally true of the Taino, the mid-century Kreyòl-speaking Haitian artists, and contemporary Atis Rezistans of the Grand Rue. The works produced are as stunningly different as the econiches within which they arose. Taino produced their works to be used in community sacred ceremonies and to designate sacred localities. There was apparently nothing comparable to galleries, museums, collectors, and an art trade market. The era of the Krèyol Haitian artists saw all these active; in addition, fads and fashions in art became a consequential environmental condition. The Atis ­Rezistans spoke of pushing back against an international commercial system and the political exclusions of Haiti and its citizens by colonial powers. DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-8 96

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The three moments are representative of art before the dominance of colonial c­ ommercialization, the nearly total capture of the arts for the colonially generated museums, the collections and marketing complex of the late modern era, and the decolonizing efforts of the twenty-first century. They exemplify the theater of colonization and decolonization: the Columbian encounter with the Taino of Kiskeya-Aiti; the mid-twentieth century emergence into international art market attention of Kreyòl artists from farming and worker families; and the recapture of agency by the Atis Rezistans of Port-au-Prince. The three moments are nested in the longer continuum distinctively performing and presenting the real presence of “I am here. See this intuition.” The two sections concerning the works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are informed by conversations with the artists, curators and gallerists, collectors, and tourists in various settings; by viewing the works in all stages of making and placements beyond the studio, and by observing the range of conditions in the econiche, the local ecosystem, and the international environment with a focus on the work of the artists, what the artworks afford, and how they are used. In the case of the Taino, where direct observation is not possible, contemporaneous reports and documents and the existing works provide secondintention information. The surfaces and shapes of the works of the absent Taino are the real tracks and trails of their having been present, revealing what the writings of the colonial outsiders cannot. As a nation’s ruler and ruling class maintain its borders and extend them, the stories that circulate and endure, habits of attention, food and clothing preferences, social protocols of those in power, habitual religious beliefs and rites, and especially the uses of the land and its living creatures, percolate throughout the entire population. This creates a national social and material ecosystem that shapes, flavors and directs attention, and thus the language and actions of the inhabitants. This includes artists, musicians, priests, performers, and storytellers. Aggrandizing leaders and ruling class extend their rule and master whole environments beyond their borders, imposing their habits and expectations. Simultaneously they remove benefits of the new territory to the colonizing center. The resulting ecosystem leads to discontent, rebellion, and various forms of physical and emotional marronage on the part of the dominated, eventually resulting in partial or nearly complete decolonization. Even seemingly ineffective ripostes destabilize the power of rulers, their death-dealing armies, and life-threatening economic and trade arrangements. Fears of hell and damnation promulgated by ruling religions become doubted. Yet, because they mirror the survival needs and desires of substantial portions of homeland and colonial populations, these tyrannical rulers hold sway and even attract impassioned devotion. Their approved arts are integral to their control. Despite being inescapably embedded in the ecosystem dominated by rulers and their rules, colonization of religions and arts is never complete. The insights and intuitions of seers do shape and even redirect the ecosystem. That is why holy persons and artists of passion and conviction are so dangerous to the malignancies of authoritarian dogmas and rulers.

Taino Sacred Arts Exactly when the Taino migrated from South America to the uninhabited island of Hispaniola is not yet securely determined, but material evidence indicates they were there for many generations before the Columbian incursion. Such reports as those of Columbus or Fray Ramón Pané2 provide insights into the exploitative perceptions of those who captured the 97

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land and people. King Ferdinand’s 1,500 letter to the Taino epitomizes arrogant ­colonial dominance based on tightly entwined religious and political presumptions that God H ­ imself delegates authority to the Catholic Pope. In God’s name, he grants territories of the earth to the Christian King of Spain, as “certified in documents.” In that pre-Reformation era, papal documents had near-biblical status as the Word of God.3 This exercise of post-facto rationale is a common feature in the seizure of high privilege and territory of rulers of all times. The military and religious conquerors, following the orders in Ferdinand’s letter, imposed Christianity on the Taino with severe penalties for those who resisted. There were the additional jeopardies of overwork, malnutrition, and diseases for which there was no local immunity. Many Taino fled into the mountains, taking along their sacred objects. Their carved and woven zemi spirits and graphics or carvings on river stones and in caves received little positive attention until the late 1950s and early 1960s. Missionary doctor, William Hodges, began a serious study of these traces, making a great many accurate documentary photographs and drawings.4 Taino objects began to be of interest to some Haitians and art historians around that same time. Many went into private and museum collections. As soon as that news circulated, fake carvings began to appear for sale. It was only then that Taino works took on new meaning as trade objects available for a sum of fiat currency. For the Taino, making and honoring them had served as fiat exchange for life, happiness, and safe passage between the invisible and visible worlds. The Taino material world was lush with vegetation, land, and sea creatures. Life was easily sustained for the entire population. Plucking fruit, hunting, fishing, together with a modest amount of digging, planting, and harvesting yielded all that was required. There was a sea-faring trade and exchange with Cuba, Jamaica, and Mexico to the west, and Trinidad and the north coast of South America to the east. There is no evidence so far that trade included their sacred objects. While life was relatively easy, there were the terrors of hurricanes (a Taino word) and earthquakes. There were certainly the usual human contentions and the fraught cycle of birth, puberty, loves, conjunctions and disjunctions, sickness and death that troubles us all. To attempt a degree of control they devised ceremonies, rituals and dedicated designs and objects. These arts were not for amusement, delight, or trade. They were material ways to contemplate and manage life’s joys, vicissitudes, and mysteries. Columbus landed on the island 6 December 1492 naming the harbor Môle St. Nicolas in honor of that saint’s name day. A few days later his three ships hove into Kiskeya at what is now Cap Haitian and deposited his weighty intangible baggage of God and King. Steeped in the Genesis story, he thought this verdant land might be near the Gates of Eden. He implanted the flag of Spain in the sand for all to see, making the invisible claim that AitiKiskeya, almost Eden, was now La Isla Española. The pleasant Taino life quickly became hard labor, novel diseases, and early death. Some Taino died in the marginally productive gold mines, some in the greatly extended planting fields, some by beatings, and some from lethal illness. Franciscan tertiary Columbus implemented Ferdinand’s severe religious injunctions, punishing practitioners of local traditions. He sent movable objects off to Spain as “barbaric” items for the rising establishment of “curiosity cabinets”: manifests of conquest. Today the sacred objects are in a diaspora of public and private collections. Effectively refusing colonization, those Natives who did not perish from brutality of the colonists or the suicide of despair went into marronage in the mountains. They continued to create and use their sacred arts and were there when enslaved Africans likewise refused colonization by escaping into marronage. In the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick, France 98

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took over the western third of Hispaniola from Spain and brought African captives into now-Saint-Domingue. There were maroons from the very first debarkation. Those who joined the Taino in the mountains continued their own sacred practices and integrated the zemi and Taino understandings of the active invisibilities of the ecosystem. Both Taino and African sensibilities and beliefs would survive and evolve in the cultural marronage of these dominated populations refusing colonization. The hidden Taino and the African escapees would make common cause against the French. The sacred arts of the Taino sustained their distinctive characteristics. The caves where ceremonies took place, with their paintings, sculptures, and altars; marked and carved stones by streams, small carvings, and fiber creations – the zemi, remain. The Taino as a separate population may be absent, but their genetic DNA remains in the population (the artist Hector Hyppolite claimed a Taino grandmother) and their sacred works are treasured inclusions in Vodou ceremonies. They are now treasured in a different way by collectors and museums. An excellent selection from those gathered from the Dominican Republic (once “Quiskeya”), France, and Italy was on display at the Musée du Petit Palais, Paris, in February–May 1994.5 The catalogue offers illustrations of a wide range of Taino sacred arts together with an informative text, providing a good, albeit distant, view. Both the catalogue and the exhibition were out of reach for most Haitians. The virtual “rooms” of the excellent catalogue have scant information about the three-dimensional shape and scale of the work; no way to feel the tools and see the hand of the makers on the stone or clay or fabric. The beliefs, insights, emotions, and skills of the creators are absent from the pages; the habitation forever missing. The sacred works were probably made in reserved locations by specially designated persons. The process of making left the trail of each maker’s indescribable personal knowledge. In their original place, the shaped or woven surfaces offered a rich complex of meaning, partly materially inherent but more abundantly attached by an exchange of physical motions, words, and songs held in common, calling attention to ensure community and personal survival. Relocated to private collections and museums they lose such attached affordances. They acquire new meanings for those who now personally “own” them in ways strange to the Taino. Other meanings are either perceived or supposed by visitors to museums. Both situations differ radically from each other and even more radically from those of the Taino makers and users. Contemporary viewers have scant use for the origination meanings, actual or supposed. The objects are in fact “put to work” as entertainment, cultural instruction, signals of wealth, and are exchanged in swaps for fiat currency that have little to do with eternal verities. On the other hand, the Africans who fled into marronage in Taino safe havens, instructed by the Taino, did come to understand and have need for what the sacred objects afforded. The maroons incorporated the works into their recollected African sacred practices that evolved into Haitian Vodou. The zemi are precious to Vodou temples, and there are Vodou worship sites in caves, intentionally placed at sites of Taino carvings or drawings. Some of the language of ceremonies and songs seems to have Taino precedents as well. Taino continuances remain fiat currency for the means of grace and hope in this life and the next. Such fiats resist colonization. Despite suppression, creative expressions evolve in their own distinctive ways, alert to, attuned with, and responsive to an ever-evolving ecosystem. This remains true until they are removed from the originating econiche. Their removals into private or museum collections are acts of colonization seizure and presumption of ownership. They become trophies of political, economic, or cultural conquest. On the other hand, 99

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they also function to expand awareness of what it is to be human here on earth. Both these conditions should be considered since both are active in the current global ecosystem. Just as the French colonists assiduously continued the suppression of both Taino and African community religious practices, so did the elites who led Haiti after independence. Protestant missionaries brought in during the United States Occupation of 1915–1934 did so with special vigor. That suppression continues. In spring of 2021, a Protestant mob vandalized Lakou Bovwa, a Vodou temple site of special significance, including its priceless Taino objects. The destruction is recognition of the power of these arts that cannot be colonized.

The Recollection of Eden in Mid-Century Haiti Haiti was economically and to some extent politically re-colonized after the fall of the Kingdom of Haiti in the north and the reparations paid to the French by President Boyer in 1845. Boyer, the Francophile son of a French father and Congo-born mother, culminated his several years of negotiations with the French by signing the reparations agreement. In 1911, France gave the debt collection over to the National City Bank of New York. Severely impoverished and suffering the tumult of five presidents in five years, unhappy mobs of citizens assassinated President Guillaume Sam in July 1915. With warships already in the harbor, the United States immediately occupied Haiti, establishing economic controls that endured long past the 1934 withdrawal of troops. Reparations continued until the final interest installment in 1947. In effect, Haiti was again a dependent colony, its citizens reacting to their devalorization with dissimulation, discontent, rage, and the active military rebellion of the Cacos under Charlemagne Péralte. As in the past, the arts supported by those with the means of patronage leaned strongly to European style with portraits and historical events the usual subjects. Although Haiti’s declaration of independence in 1804 effectively ended legal enslavement, colonial cultural preferences pervaded the ruling class and were even apparent among the rebels. However, in the workers’ neighborhoods of the cities and out in the countryside – the andeyo, artists continued to use their personal knowledge and create works arising out of the econiche of their locale and community. That econiche included the long conversations and habits of attention of time immemorial, passed along from ancestors to descendants. In the 1940s with a war in the Pacific and on European fronts, the United States’ presence, while no longer an occupation, nevertheless continued political and economic controls with multiple interventions and supports, including that for the arts. Nelson Rockefeller and his colleague, art director René d’Harnoncourt, encouraged the US Embassy to support the establishment of a center of the arts that several Haitian artists and literary figures had for several years urged the Haitian government to endorse. In 1944, the founding Haitian group agreed to appoint US artist Dewitt Peters, a conscientious objector sent to Haiti as his alternative wartime service, as director of the Centre d’Art. Peters proved to be an able manager, promoter, and fundraiser. At first the Centre featured the works of the founding artists and others who had either studied abroad or had similar studio training and criteria. Several of the members enthusiastically followed the teachings of scholar Jean Price-Mars, who urged a revalorization of Haiti’s African heritage. Writer Philippe Thoby-Marcelin spent much of his time observing life in the small towns and countryside, and it was on a roadside near St. Marc that he first saw a Vodou ounfo wall with a painting by Hector Hyppolite. He made haste to bring 100

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Peters to the site and urged him to exhibit the artist’s small portable paintings in the Centre. Peters was reluctant but deferred to the writer’s enthusiasm. The story of what happened next is in every book on Haitian art. André Breton, in marronage from Nazi controlled France, and Cuban artist Wifredo Lam saw the works on their visit to Haiti. Breton pronounced that if such works had been seen in Europe, they would have changed the history of art. Hyppolite’s paintings were on scavenged wallboard, housepaint enamels brushed on with chicken feathers tied to sticks, every rough stroke direct evidence of a passionate engagement with all of life. Breton bought eight paintings and changed the history of art in Haiti. Within days, artists from the urban worker districts, including some employed at the Centre, began to bring their paintings, ceramics, and iron works made from discarded oil drums to the Centre. Exhibited, and with Breton and Lam’s praises echoing in the patron class and at the US Embassy, these exciting novelties captured attention. Ironically, Breton’s encomiums and purchases captured the Kreyòl andeyo workers’ creations for the expanding international art market, already by then an economically driven cultural colonization. In a resonant echo of the 1855 Exposition in Paris display of African works, Hyppolite’s paintings and the works of other Kreyòl andeyo painters and sculptors on display at the UNESCO Paris Exhibition in 1946 garnered international attention. Haitians, deliberately kept invisible by powerful nations, now lit up the whole world with tropical color. Hyppolite recognized the talent of teenage Wilson Bigaud and brought him to the Centre. Bigaud was doing sculptures, but Peters suggested that he would like drawing and painting. That intuition proved correct and young Wilson was soon doing impressive works. He was one of those selected to do murals for the Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral and his Marriage at Cana received acclaim. As the late sculptor Jason Seley informed me, those attached to the Centre told the story that Wilson was wondering what he might paint next. Peters suggested he look at the art books in the Centre’s library for inspiration. Intended as supportive mentoring, it was effectively a marginalization of Bigaud’s Kreyòl, Vodou family traditions, and a further bending into the Christian art of Europe. Leafing through the books, Bigaud came upon illustrations of the Temptation of Adam and Eve, a story familiar to him from parochial school. In one, Lucas Cranach depicts Satan in the tree, the couple below, surrounded by diverse animals, beyond them a distant field and a white horse. A black boar in the middle ground is in the same position as the black boar (for Haitians a symbol of the revolution) in Bigaud’s painting. Of all the paintings in the books, this one seems to be the one that held his attention. It is perhaps accidental that both Cranach and Bigaud were navigating the divide between one religious world view and another. Originally Catholic, Cranach became a friend of Martin Luther, converted, but was still beholden to Catholic patrons. Bigaud, reared in the Vodou tradition, felt called by the divine spirit, Ezili. Support from Episcopal Bishop Alfred Voegeli while doing the mural, joined with teachings in a Christian school, pulled him in two directions. At the 1950 International Exhibition in Washington, DC, Bigaud’s Eden took second prize. Instantly the news was on telejol, the person-to-person communication system that spread the news to all Haiti. Bigaud and the Eden subject were nationally famous. As he did with his Marriage at Cana, Bigaud repeated his success, this time with at least five more versions, now in private collections outside Haiti. Both Marriage and Eden include Vodou images in the ostensibly Christian subject, some separately identifiable, some conflated, just as they are in Vodou. Bigaud’s giraffe and elephant in the background evoke the memory of the ancient African homeland. Anansi, the spider who connects the continents, spins a 101

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web high in the trees. This shape- and gender-changing West African trickster spirit crossed the Middle Passage with the captives and settled with them all over the Caribbean and the United States south, appearing in stories and manifesting in Vodou ceremonies. Another Kreyòl painter, Préfèt Duffaut, depicted this spirit as the Spider Queen standing on Christian symbols Breton missionaries brought into Haiti. A web surrounds her head like a halo. Like Eve, she holds a bright red apple. In Bigaud’s original painting a large web in a center tree connects to a smaller one in the darkness upper right with nearly invisible lines. The work illustrates the complexity of the web of colonization’s profoundly influential ideas, images, beliefs, hopes, fears, and appetites that branch into life dendritically, like tree roots or the nervous system. Bigaud’s Eden, about to be Paradise Lost, became a dendritic social and economic structure. Within days after his success became known, anyone who could pick up a brush or chisel went to work hoping for a bit of income. Eden paintings and iron drum sculptures began to blossom on walls in downtown Port-au-Prince, propped up around the Champ-de-Mars and the Post Office, and displayed to debarking tourists. Eden paintings and sculptures became the most frequent subject in Haitian art, especially if the “jungle” works are included. Bigaud himself repeated his own two great works to sell. Some have claimed that Haitian art at that time was Haiti’s third most important export after sugar and coffee. All those Edenic works have reasons other than their value as tourist souvenirs: like the original story handed down through millennia, they are marks of a dream and a hope. Longing for a lost paradise may be universal. Marriage at Cana and Eden involved two worlds in their creation: the African heritage of Bigaud’s parents and ancestors, and the Christian salvation promised by the foreign missionaries. For Wilson Bigaud, serious about both, they contested for his very soul. Torn, he had to be hospitalized. The paintings he did in the hospital and for all the years after were depictions of everyday life: birthday celebrations, weddings, market days. The handling is less precise and detailed as in the two masterpieces, the color less brilliant and the compositions less intricate. They are good works, still clearly personal and connected to Bigaud’s community life. Works done in the service of two masters were too costly. The earthquake of 2010 destroyed the Marriage at Cana mural. The original Eden, held by the Musée d’Art Haïtien, also suffered damage. Restored by Smithsonian experts, it is now at the rebuilt Centre d’Art and will someday be on display again in Haiti as a national treasure.

Atis Resiztans and the Geto Byenale At the beginning of this century, on the land Columbus thought was near Eden, many districts had become middens where the contemporary colonizers, “First World” nations, dumped their trash. The colorful paintings and metal works of Kreyòl artists were scraps of paradise remembered. Gabriel Bien-Aimé’s three-dimensional steel Eden was on display in the French cultural center a few steps from the exhausted school buses and firetrucks, cars, and vans, jumbled into an intersection of the long Grand Rue. A few blocks further in the same low-income neighborhood is a public cemetery where the remains of the departed lie, many just barely covered and subject to both tender caretaking and exhumations. On the other side of Grand Rue are shops cheek by jowl with one-room dwellings made of foraged cinder block or plywood, roofed with corrugated tin from the US. Beyond them is Boulevard Harry Truman, the scenic route along the harbor. Between the two avenues, in lakou Cheri and lakou Leanne,6 live several urban and urbane artists with more education and knowledge than is usually attributed to them by the “First World.” They set up indoor 102

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and outdoor studios where they produced their works and taught the girls and boys of the lakou, passing along useful knowledge and skill together with ancestral traditions and sensibilities. Like the Kreyòl and andeyo artists that had come to the Centre d’Art in the 1950s, they were neither naive nor primitive. Their works had been featured in an exhibition in a Florida museum but despite concerted efforts by the museum director and the Haitian gallerists who created the art show, they themselves were refused entry into the United States. On the other hand, they were the subject of a documentary video by British filmmaker, Leah Gordon.7 They and their works would travel to Liverpool for a special exhibition commemorating the 1807 termination of the slave trade. In 2009, smarting from the refusal of entry into the US, led by artist André Eugene, and assisted by Leah Gordon, they decided to mount their own exhibition in Port-au-Prince. Quite aware of the Venice Biennale and also knowing that the first exclusionary ghetto had been formed in Venice, these Atis Resistanz decided to call the exhibition the Ghetto Biennale (in Kreyòl, Geto Byenale). They put out a call for proposals from artists and art writers from all countries and by late September 2009 had accepted 14 artists’ proposals and several from art writers. The event opened on 18 December 2009 with speakers in the lecture hall at FOKAL. The next day there was fanfare: Haitian music bands paraded into Cherie and Leanne lakous, a dance troupe from Jacmel and the artists of the lakou and other countries gathered to show and discuss their works. The Minister of Culture and her official entourage appeared. A teenage artist of the lakou had fashioned a tin box and juice can into a “video camera” and sought to interview the minister. To her credit, she looked straight into the “lens” and responded to the young man’s good questions with the same sort of answers she would have given to a formal news organization. (Only days later, someone arranged to give the budding journalist a real video camera and supported his enrollment in the newly founded school of video documentation in Jacmel.) The Geto Byenale was a radical, material retaking of cultural territory. The artists had reconstructed cast-off clothing, broken toys, tires, and vehicle parts together with skeletal remains from the cemetery to present self and community as visual works nested in ancestral spiritual cosmologies as natif-natal as themselves. The use of human bones caused some problems, but the response of one of the artists on a documentary is telling. He holds up a skull. In Krèyol he tells the viewer: “See this guy? All his life he never got to go anywhere. Now he can go all over the world.” In fact, he did. The works went to the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Switzerland. It was marronage in plain sight, the inspirited works asserting powerful witness of robust decolonization. Several years after the earthquake of 2010 at a gathering of international scholars in the newly built Centre d’Art, leading artist André Eugene was there, dressed in a formal black suit and wearing eyeglasses with one mirror and one clear lens that look into two worlds. He was inhabiting the dramatis persona of Vodou Gedé, Bawon (Baron) Samedi. Presenting himself to an historian who had been at the first Byenale, he said in flawless English, “Do you remember who I am?”

Notes 1 See http://www.atis-rezistans.com/about.php for the description approved by the artists. 2 Fray Raymond Pané, An account of the Antiquities of the Indians, trans. Susan C. Griswold (­Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999). 3 Full text in English translation is at https://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/before-1600/king-­ ferdinands-letter-to-the-taino-arawak-indians.php.

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LeGrace Benson 4 Paul Hodges now curates these photographs and expects to publish them soon. He graciously shared jpeg images with the author. 5 Jacques Kerchache, L’art des sculpteurs Taïnos; chef-d’œuvre des grands Antilles Precolombiens (Paris: Musees de la ville de Paris, 1994). 6 Lakou is the Kreyòl word for a neighborhood formed from extended families and their close friends. 7 Leah Gordon, Grand Rue Artists, available at vimeo.com/51848464 (2022).

Selected Bibliography Gordon, Leah. “The Sculptors of Grand Rue”, accessed December 19, 2022 https://vimeo. com/51848464. Kerchache, Jacques. L’art des sculpteurs Taïnos; chef-d’œuvre des grands Antilles Precolombiens. Paris: Musees de la ville de Paris, 1994. Pané, Fray Raymond. An account of the Antiquities of the Indians, trans. Susan C. Griswold. D ­ urham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999.

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6 THE MAQUETTE-MODÈLES OF BODYS ISEK KINGELEZ Creole Visions of Decolonial Monuments Sandrine Colard

When the Museum of Modern Art in New York City presented Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams, the first retrospective it ever dedicated to a Black African artist in 2018, it made up for the belatedness by investing into a lavish exhibition design.1 Exquisitely restored, the phantasmagorical maquettes of the Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez (1948–2015) were mounted on large, sometimes overlapping round and oval tables of different heights. Laid out on a completely open floor, the assembled miniature and colorful buildings created a hallucinated and hilly cityscape revealing itself on an immaculate horizon. Conceived in collaboration with the German, Congo-lover artist Carston Höller, the generous display was made even more expansive thanks to three ceiling mirrors hovering over Kingelez’s urban dreams and multiplying them in artificial skies’ reflections. For many visitors the climax of the show was the interactive, virtual reality experience that allowed immersing oneself into Ville Fantôme (1996), one of Kingelez’s largest city sculptures. In the absence of any real-life architectural constructions built after the artist’s models, the VR tour offered the possibility to walk the enchanted streets that he envisioned. Astonishingly, and for all the marvelous feast for the eyes that visiting the exhibition was, all the optical enhancements proposed by these scenic efforts and technical prowess reinforced a sense of distancing toward the pieces, rather than of proximity. The impossibility of leaning over and observing the intricacy and delicacy of the innumerable details in the middle of the widest maquettes was not fixed by the mirrors, but replicated in these bird’s-eye views. If the visitor had not noticed it before, the virtual tour made them aware that many Kingelez’s buildings did not bother with realistic entry points nor amenities. Now blown up to the size of real-life edifices, Kingelez’s creations still appeared self-contained, highly ornate but impenetrable volumes, and passing them by—if only just virtually—did not invite engagement but contemplation. Projected from the stage of maquette into a computer-generated “public space,” the buildings continued to appear as sculpted forms not conceived for functional use but to inspire the sort of commanding approach and respectful distance traditionally pertaining less to serviceable architecture than to another type of open-air constructions: monuments. With a creative period spanning between 1980 and 2015, Bodys Isek Kingelez’s oeuvre developed in close relation to Congo’s decolonizing era, which similarly to the newly independent African countries from the 1960s on, materialized their liberation through the 105

DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-9

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transformation of their cities’ architecture, public spaces and monuments.2 Focusing on the first two decades of Kingelez’s production (1980–1997), this chapter argues that the artist’s oeuvre and single structures in particular offer models for monuments or “citymonuments,” not only for his native Congo but more largely in the context of the postcolonial global world. Radically diverging from the tradition of monumentalization in size, aesthetic, and materiality, this chapter pursues the argument that Kingelez’s commitment to making reduced scale, paper thin yet aesthetically flamboyant maquette-monuments, was not merely due to the assumed shortage of means or failure to secure public authorities’ support, but rather a conceptual recast of the rightful built embodiment of fundamental values for newly decolonized societies. By contrast with the imposing, enduring, and stern colonial statues, and then as differently from the post-independence proliferation of even more colossal memorials to African post-colonial leaders,3 Kingelez carved out in cardboard purposefully fragile, utopian-looking, and non-figurative alternatives that he coined “extreme maquettes.” As maquettes pushed to their “extreme” form without ever being realized, they keep future projections as their perpetual delayed horizon, pointing at a future pregnant with limitless possibilities but so fragile that they need to be cared for and endlessly restored and re-imagined to advent. Preceding by decades the Western societies’ internal conflicts over the survival of colonial monuments, this chapter explores what lessons Kingelez’s African-born visions can teach the twenty-first century and Western decolonial movement as it struggles to renew its urban imagination.

A Decolonial Turning Point: The Echangeur de Limete Born in 1948 and coming of age at the time of his country’s 1960 independence, Kingelez moved from his native village, Kimbembele-Ilhunga, to Kinshasa in 1970. At that time, the capital’s old colonial monuments were removed and new ones erected to usher the Congolese people into a decolonized, “authentically African” era.4 Just one year after Kingelez’s arrival in town, the equestrian statue of King Leopold II of Belgium was relegated from its place of honor on a city center boulevard to a city depot. That same year, a massive spear and shield holding sculpture by the Congolese artist Alfred Liyolo, Le Bouclier de la Révolution (The Shield of the Revolution), supplanted the statue of Henry Morton Stanley, Leopold’s indispensable envoy in his colonial conquest. Still in 1970, the construction of the most emblematic monument of Congo’s emancipation, the Limete Tower, was kicked off in the newly renamed Zaïre. Commissioned by President Mobutu Sese Seko to the French-Tunisian architect Olivier-Clément Cagoub, the never-completed 210-meter high tower was given the appearance of a rocket’s launching pad, in the image of the limitless ambitions and optimism that characterized the first decade of Mobutu’s presidency. One of the earliest maquettes created by Kingelez in 1981 is precisely Approche de l’Echangeur de Limete and it stands out from the rest of his later work in a fundamental way. Instead of an imaginary project, it miniaturizes an actual building in the city of Kinshasa. In short, it encompasses the opposite creative gesture that Kingelez will pursue the rest of his life: it is not a preliminary maquette but an a posteriori reduced model. That after representing this monument the artist bid farewell to mimesis deserves for us to pause and probe its significance (Figure 6.1). When Kingelez produced Approche in 1981, the construction works on the actual ­Limete Tower had already been on halt for seven years.5 The prospect of the abandonment of its finalization was undoubtedly becoming obvious, and with it, the other shortcomings 106

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Figure 6.1  Bodys Isek Kingelez, Approche de l’echangeur de limete, 1981 (82 × 35, 2 × 42, 6 cm). Private Collection, Paris. Picture by Julien De Bock.

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of the decolonization process. The dictatorial turn of Mobutu’s governance had been ­initiated ­several years prior. In 1969, the army had killed 40 students protesting for reform at L ­ ovanium University. When Kingelez arrived on campus one year later in 1970, Mobutu, a single candidate to his own re-election, obtained near 100% of the votes. A dramatic economic crisis caused by the vertiginous drop in copper price, by corruption and public money misappropriation, likely explains in an important measure the stop put on the ­Limete Tower’s progress. Also called the “National Heroes Monument,” in 1966 Mobutu had announced with as much fanfare as cynicism that l’Echangeur de Limete would be the future site of a monument raised to the memory of Patrice Lumumba, the martyred first prime minister of independent Congo. By 1981, when Kingelez made Approche, Mobutu’s key complicity in the arrest and assassination of Lumumba was an open secret, and the Congolese people’s awareness that monuments were not only fallible but could also be plainly corrupted undoubtedly running high. If decades of living at the feet of pompous colonial memorials had not alerted Kinshasa’s inhabitants on their travesty of history, the unfolding fate of the Echangeur de Limete became a spectacular city reminder of the betrayal of the independence moment. For Kingelez, the contemplation—or his “approach”—of the Echangeur over the first ten years of his life in Kinshasa, can only have crystallized his disillusion with the decolonization process in his town and in his country, the way Walter Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh describe it more globally. “Decolonization during the Cold War meant the struggle for liberations of the Third World and, when successful, the formation of nation-states claiming sovereignty. By the 1990s, decolonization’s failure in most nations had become clear; with state in the hands of minority elites, the patterns of colonial power continued both internally (i.e., internal colonialism) and with relation to global structures. At that moment coloniality was unveiled; decoloniality was born in the unveiling of coloniality.”6 Similarly, within a decade, the Limete Tower transitioned form being a beacon of African emancipation to the impenetrable “coloniality fortress” of a kleptocrat dictator who would cling to power until 1997, with the support of the Western Bloc. A high rise visible from many vantage points in town, the confrontation with this deeply flawed monument seems to have fortified the artist’s ambition to entirely reshape them. After Approche, Kingelez quit making “monuments-as-they-are” to rather propose “monuments-as-they-should-be.” The realization that monuments should “make more of an effort,”7 threw Kingelez into a reclusive life in his Kinshasa house, dedicated to the model-making of new “decolonial” monuments.

From a Monument to “Anti-Valeurs” to “Maquettes Modèles” or “Extreme Maquettes” The notion that Kingelez’ pieces were conceived as maquettes for monuments rather than as functioning cities and buildings has been evoked by many. His hybrid medium, at the intersection of sculpture, architecture, urbanism, and design, have vexed gatekeepers of museums’ departmental classifications, but it also has continually combined artistic intentions with the spatial and public space dimensions that define monuments’ making. Some have remarked the artist’s exclusive preoccupation with the collective and the complete absence of private residences from his production as proof of his community and civic-minded ­ aquettes ­engagement, another core feature of monuments.8 Others have noted how his m only “referred to architecture”; how they are “hermetically sealed and impossible to 108

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enter, (… without any) inner life,”9 and are in fact “impractical,”10 in the same way that ­monuments are traditionally meant to be admired from a respectful distance and rarely penetrated. More than all these, it is Kingelez’s invariable allegorization of his works as a series of ideals that affiliate them with monuments. The most recurrent of them are peace (Palais d’Hiroshima, 1991; Centrale Palestinienne, 1993; Dialogue de Paix, 1995; U.N., 1995; New Manhattan, 2004); democracy and freedom (Réveillon fédéral, 1992; Ville Fantôme, 1996); education and knowledge (Maryland University, 1981); technological progress (­Aéromode [Aéroport Moderne], 1981); and care (The Scientific Center of Hospitalisation the SIDA, 1991; Industria de Pharmacia, 1992). Yet, contrary to the tradition of figurative monuments, none of these honors nor represents any particular individuals (up to 1997, the only name to be found is that of Kingelez himself), and specific historical events constitute the minority of the artist’s creations. Rather, the artist’s works operate through allegories, with buildings, towers, cities and more, standing for the values held in his highest regard, but also, for the silent disapproval of the current political and social climate. In Zaïre itself, the gradual unveiling of “coloniality” came to be known as the reign of “anti-valeurs” (anti-values), and Kingelez certainly struggled against what he perceived as the degradation of Kinshasa and Kinois society. In his many declarations, the artist has repeatedly stated the importance of “models” for a society, and his often enigmatic statements about them become more graspable when the word is taken as double entendre: first as that which is a small scale and preliminary study to be reproduced in its final, bigger size (a maquette), and second, that which is a reference to be emulated because of its moral superiority or its perfection. “Without a model, you are nowhere. A nation that can’t make models is a nation that doesn’t understand things, a nation that doesn’t live.”11 The typically immodest public persona of Kingelez and the self-aggrandized prose that he usually dispensed in interviews—he once called himself “a small God”—do make it tempting to strictly interpret this sentence as another boasting of his maquettiste skills as essential to nothing less than the nation’s very existence. However, the quote reads in a less megalomaniac way when taken in its second sense of moral example or values: “without moral values, you are nowhere.” Particularly for people from Kingelez’s generation, the late post-colonial Congo was often seen as marred by what Kinshasa’s inhabitants have called “anti-valeurs.” Defined as the “the gradual deterioration of the educational system, the political corruption, the erosion of family values and respect for the body, elderly, and even nature,”12 the anti-valeurs made urgent to set examples or “models” for the Congolese society and to re-establish moral values amidst a long-term decolonization process gone amok, as the insolence of the Limete Tower reminded citizens every day. Against this monumental counter-example, Kingelez’s lifelong oeuvre will be the preparation of exemplary reduced scale models inspiring the highest virtues, the “extreme maquettes.” The absence of any heroic or political figurations from Kingelez’s urban maquettes is noticeable, particularly when those of African leaders kept multiplying—solid and ­grandiose—and replacing fallen colonial statues all over the cities’ continent. One of the earliest and almost single direct reference to Mobutu, his image, his party, and his policies is made in La Cité du 24 Novembre de l’Authenticité pour les Musées Zaïrois (1979), and the disappearance of any later praise of the president from Kingelez’s maquettes is telling. The artist’s complete refrain from erecting flattering effigies under the leadership of a man, Mobutu, who “only wanted to preserve a memory exalting his personality and his deeds”13 is a silent confession, at the very least, of political distrust. Under the 1980s dictatorship, when the omnipresent cult of personality of the president was at its peak and that suspicion 109

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of dissidence was passable of treason and public hanging, any criticism of the regime could only be expressed indirectly. Z. S. Strother has explained how “because of the muzzling of free speech during the authoritarian regime of Mobutu Sese Seko (1971–1997), … strategies of silence, allegory and indirection continued to complicate representations.”14 Similarly to the well-known “popular painting” genre thriving starting independence, the allegorical process was a widespread but also the safest channel of political expression for artists. As T. K. Biaya remarks, the gradual disappearance of Lumumba then Mobutu from popular painters’ canvases, to be supplanted by the popular inakale motif, is the reflection of a period when the “aggravation of the crisis and the end of hope” prevailed.15 Translated as “everything is stuck,” inakale represented a person perched high on a tree, trapped between ferocious beasts—crocodile in the water, panther or lion on the ground, and a snake on a branch. Just like in Zaïrian society, the people were cornered by neocolonial and neoliberal foreign forces, the corrupted and outrageously wealthy local elite, and a dictator, with no hope of viable escape. The invisibility of strongmen in Kingelez’s urban motifs is also a refusal to participate in the imposed and exalted figuration of their deeds and personas; it is a critique by omission of the leadership situation of his country. However, strikingly different from inakale’s painted helplessness, the allegories that Kingelez uses never evoke impasses, but rather always project the future overcoming of hardships. One of the most poignant of these resilient visions is certainly The Scientific Center of Hospitalisation the SIDA (1991). With the sad record of registering the first cases of the HIV epidemic as early as 1983, the Congo counted no less than 1.3 million infected people by 2001. In the 1990s when Kingelez produced this piece, life expectancy in the country had dropped by 9% because of AIDS. The direct and tremendous impact of poverty, class and gender inequality, wars and medical neglect of the proliferation of the virus has been widely established.16 The Zaïrian government’s responsibility in the lethal development of the epidemic was criminal: By the 1970s much of the existing health network had broken down, exacerbated by Mobutu’s attack on the churches which had provided the majority of services in rural areas. The government system suffered from “leaky pipelines.” For example, antibiotics supplied by WHO against tuberculosis were siphoned off for sale in private pharmacies.17 Adopting the form of a hospital entirely dedicated to the care of HIV patients, The Scientific Center again resembles more of a monument to care than a projection for an actual functioning health center.18 If built, the mostly opaque windows and the obstructed side facades would make the interior rooms dark; the unapparent doors and the access or the exit of the place through a series of seven paralleled toboggans or a very steep flight of stair would be completely impracticable for gravely ill or recovering patients. Rather, the maquette is an ode to the idea of care and compassion. The flashy yellow and red sign, clearly spelling the mission of the place high on the front façade, is an embracing gesture of the epidemic’s victims, when they were so completely abandoned to their affliction by the authorities and rendered invisible by AIDS denialism.19 The whole building rises up against this taboo, as a monument opposing the silencing of a historical tragedy at the time of its unfolding. The soothing pale pink, blue, and yellow tones and the recurrent red and yellow stars contrasts with the usually depressing clinical look. What is lost in practicality is gained in the lightness of the structure: from certain perspectives, the building seems to rest on air and 110

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levitate, uplifting the sick ones from earthly pains. Kingelezs piece is an allegory of care, one that brings back the hospitality that had deserted Congolese AIDS victims (Figure 6.2). The dedication of Kingelez to maquettes-making only and their futurist and extraordinary shapes bear the imprint of the persistent post-independence’s auspicious outlook onto the future. Decolonization was “a promise whose main mode of existence was its futurity”20 and as blueprints of—hypothetical—constructions to come, maquettes are intrinsically turned toward better times ahead. As such, Kingelez’s models are future-facing visions more than “lieux de mémoire,”21 and this, even when they are explicitly commemorative. In 1991, the artist finalized Palais d’Hiroshima, a tribute to the Japanese victims of World War II nuclear disaster. Kingelez resorts to the frequent “pagoda” motif that was popular in Zaïre, where the decorative influence of China directly inspired the presidential palace of Gbadolite and the Mao suit-inspired abacost,22 the menswear officially promoted as part of Mobutu’s authenticity campaign. Beyond that orientalist touch, it is the predominance of candy color palette—soft blues, pinks, and yellows—as well as the impertinent curled-up roofs topped up by twirling chimneys that imprint the eye. The playful and even joyful tonality of this piece is at odds with the tragic event it honors, all the more when compared with the Memorial Cenotaph built for the victims in the city of Hiroshima. An imposing concrete and granite arch housing the name register of the A-bomb casualties, the memorial was shaped on the model of an ancient type of Japanese dwelling, and intended as a shelter for the departed souls. Similarly, the piece New Manhattan (2002), created as a

Figure 6.2  Bodys Isek Kingelez, The scientific center of hospitalisation the SIDA, 1991 (43 × 65 × 80 cm). Groninger Museum, Groningen. Picture by Julien De Bock.

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tribute to New York City after it suffered the 9/11 attacks, is made of a multitude of shiny, patterned, and defiant towers, two of which were to be filled with water, as a snub to another hypothetical terrorist fire and fury.23 Again, the actual 9/11 Memorial in New York City stands in stark contrast with Kingelez’s project: two sober and gigantic square holes mark the absence of the twin towers as two perpetually open wounds, surrounded by trees. Rather, what Kingelez does is to turn the gravity of history and its elegiac and monumental embodiments into lightweight and visually dazzling structures. That ability to alchemize disaster and pain into audacious artworks of exhilarating beauty, while remaining immune to any forms of nostalgia regarding the past, is a double posture that Kingelez inherited from living the élan of independence and then surviving the free fall of Zaïre and then the Democratic Republic of the Congo states, one scathing satellite of the matrix of the world’s coloniality.24

Converting the Independence’s Power of Imagination for the Twenty-First Century: Creolizing Monuments Invariably, the aspect of Kingelez’s work that has fascinated the most is how he carried his effervescent imagination through his country’s crisis. The rapture sparked by his urban fantasies has been felt all the more stirring for rising from the mind of an artist who spent his whole life in a country falling into ruins. After his work was first exhibited in the 1989 show Magiciens de la Terre in Paris, captivated Western critics liked to marvel at the abyss that separated Kingelez’s hallucinated visions from the hometown from which he drew his inspiration, Kinshasa. “A slum dying in anarchy and mismanagement”25 for some, “a collapsing (…) city cracking like a piece of dry mud in the swinging mood of a post-imperial Congo”26 for others, in this bleak depiction of the present-day DRC capital it was even deemed a wonder that Kingelez could keep clean the recycled cardboard, plastic, and paper with which he exclusively built his glittering architectural sculptures at first. Yet, Kingelez’s sublimation of cities bore upon places well beyond the geographical limits of his country. Among the 33 works that composed the largest retrospective dedicated to the artist at MoMA in 2018, no less than half are named after, inspired by, or indirectly references Western and Asian polis and nations and in the artist’s hands, all are reborn as similarly phantasmagorical and idealized sites. Even before the international turn of his career after 1989, Kingelez’s creative scope knew no frontiers: Maryland University and Allemagne An 2000 were produced in 1981 and 1988, respectively. Later, Mongolique Soviétique (1989), Paris Nouvel (1989), Belle Hollandaise (1991), Ville de Sète (2000), and Nippon Tower (2005) among many others, continued to map the international atlas of the artist’s mind. From the center of the African continent and during a quasi-sedentary and hermit-like life, Kingelez nevertheless deployed what the thinker Édouard Glissant has famously formulated as the pensée archipélique (archipelagic thinking). Anchored in the singular geography of his native Caribbean but conceived as a paradigm for the world in becoming, Glissant proposed the archipelagos’s center-less, fluid, relational, and interconnected sea- and landscape as the laboratory for a new, non-totalitarian totality of the world, the tout-monde. Glissant saw the development of the creole language and culture of the Caribbean as a forerunner of the creolization of the entire world, one profoundly at work in Kingelez’s oeuvre.27 Firmly rooted in Kinshasa and simultaneously, in an imaginary swirling around the world, the maquettes of Kingelez are by definition creole, born from the unexpected 112

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encounter of such a kaleidoscope of forms, colors, materials, and inspirations, that Las Vegas, Belgian colonial architecture, Chinese pagodas, his native village of Kimbebele Ilhunga, and the Italian designer Ettore Sottsas, are some of the many perceived or supposed influences that make Kingelez’s work unclassifiable. Similarly, the artist takes many liberties with normative languages in his feverish eloquence or in the frequent neologisms and borrowings from foreign languages that make his works’ titles (Aéromode, Papitheca, Atandel, Industria de Pharmacia, Afrikanisch, for instance). His innate linguistic “creole” doubles his formal creolization, and at the time of Mobutu’s “authenticity” and zaïrianisation (economic nationalization) years, it is particularly stunning that Kingelez embraced early on such an unapologetically hybrid aesthetic, and that he developed a repertory of international maquettes, including ones showing re-imagined former imperial centers such as Brussels (Miss Hotel Brussels, 1992). Kingelez ignored the injunctions to “authenticity” in their various declinations, either as the strategic identity withdrawal promoted by Mobutu, or as the perpetual policing of foreign influences that has defined Western appreciation of African art. In essence, Kingelez’s work performs what Glissant designates as the only manner one can subvert and survive globalization, that is, “the enormous insurrection of the imaginary faculties.” In effect, Kingelez’s lifelong experiment with the reconceptualization of monuments ­rebels against their tradition in almost every aspects. Against the racist hierarchies of imperial memorials, but as equally against any essentialism or nationalist logics, the artist connects in one non-aligned gesture his native Zaïre (or Congo) within a network of archipelagic ­maquette-monuments scattered in Japan, France, Australia, Holland, Korea, the USA, Spain, Palestine, Canada, the USSR, and Germany, to name a few of the regions that he references. Each piece individually aggregates such an unruly array of forms that any allegiance to specific countries (or their leaders) is superseded and subordinated to greater ideals. The very notion of a creolized monument overwhelms fixed identities, and it also runs counter to the pretense of stable meaning about culture, history, or linear temporality that have been their traditional bedrock.

Conclusion For living his whole life witnessing the political quicksand of his country’s erosion into neo-colonialism and dictatorship, Kingelez appears to have renounced personification and the inevitable human fallibility in embodying what ideals a society should look up to. The unique known figuration included in one of his maquettes is La Cité du 24 Novembre de l’Authenticité Pour les Musées Zaïrois (1979). It shows a tiny photographic portrait of Mobutu, pinned down on a sphere and topped by the “MPR” 28 party inscription. Today, it is held in the collection of the Institut des Musées Nationaux du Congo (IMNC) on the Mount Ngaliema in Kinshasa. Probably the earliest known piece of the artist, it predates the disenchantment with the promises of Mobutu’s regime, and today, it is impossible to know whether Kingelez ever ambitioned for it to be built life-size. Nevertheless, in his work, figuration receded together with monumentalization. As seen with the above discussion of the Echangeur de Limete, subsequently to the Zaïre president’s gigantic betrayal of this emancipation symbol, Kingelez committed to a lifelong creation of reduced scale monuments only, to a personal reinvention of their conception created in solitude, from the fringe of society. However, rather than renouncements or despair, all of Kingelez’s maquettes have continually cultivated the optimism of the independence moment that would 113

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gradually vanish around him; they would all project the promising future of what Édouard Glissant has called a “world-in-relation.” The fragility of that hope and of one society’s values imperatively requires continuous care and attention. Instead of the masquerading of metal-hard monuments as being eternal, Kingelez’s cardboard, plastic, and paper maquettes-monuments claim their vulnerability.29 Differently from the postmodern “counter-monuments”30 bound to disintegrate and vanish as a process mirroring the impossibility to rightly preserve and honor memory, those of Kingelez beg constant restoration and delicate handling to continue existing. Once working as a restorer of classical African sculpture himself, the artist intimately knew that the restorative gesture was synonymous to conferring value to an object and what it stood for. By continually choosing to commit himself to a fragile medium at the risk of seeing his oeuvre disappear, he bequeathed to his country and the world the wisdom acquired from seeing the rise and fall of men drunk with power, raising colossal monuments to themselves, and yet, made disposable by the hazards of history. To this day, the massive gathering and patient restoration of Kingelez’s maquettes presented at MoMA in 2019 is the closest realization of the artist’s vision of world’s monuments not as architectural impositions in front of which to bow, but as a delicate inheritance of which preservation is in the hands of following generations. But at the same time, the virtual reality tour and its aggrandizement of the maquette Ville Fantôme crosses the threshold of monumentalization and, in this way, it betrays Kingelez’s decolonial legacy by reinstating the monuments’ distant and overbearing status quo: it restores colonial monumentality. Yet, throughout his life, Kingelez’s recurring artistic question has been: What good are the physical monuments, without sustaining the values that help our societies to thrive? Monuments are only as legitimate as the rightfulness of the values that they embody, and those ideals and memories do not endure because of the hardness of a material and their colossal dimensions, but because to the vigilant care one continues to bring to the most fragile.

Notes 1 Curated by Sarah Suzuki, the exhibition was on view between May 26, 2018, and January 1, 2019. 2 The Democratic Republic of the Congo was the personal colony of King Leopold II of Belgium between 1885 and 1908, and was then called the Congo Free State. It became the colony of the Belgian state in 1908 when it changed its name to Belgian Congo, until the country gained its independence in 1960. 3 See, for instance, Che Onejoon, International Friendship. The Gifts from Africa (Heidelberg  : Kehrer Verlag, 2022). 4 In the post-colonial Congo, the “recourse to authenticity” was a cultural ideology promoted by Mobutu’s government, meant to put an end to Africans’ “mental alienation” provoked by colonialism. It encouraged the increased consciousness of indigenous cultural values, and practically translated by changes of names, dress, the restitution of artworks, among other things. See, for instance, Sarah Van Beurden, Authentically African. Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture (Athens, OHio: Ohio University Press, 2015). 5 Sarah Suzuki. Bodys Isek Kingelez (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018), 17. 6 Walter Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. (­Durham, NC and London : Duke University Press, 2018), 5–6. 7 As advocated by Robert Musil in his 1927 essay “Monuments,” trans. B. Pike, in Selected ­Writings, ed. B. Pike (New York, 1986). 8 Fereshteh Dafatri, “Project 59: Architecture as Metaphor: James Casebere ... [et Al.],” The Museum of Modern Art, 1997, 5; Sarah Suzuki, op. cit., 12.

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Creole Visions of Decolonial Monuments 9 Marjorie Jongbloed, quoted in Suzuki, op. cit., 18. 10 Dafatri, op. cit., 5. 11 Dirk Dumon, “Une ville repensée,” 30 min, Piksa, 2003. 12 Katrien Pype, “Dancing to the Rhythm of Léopoldville,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 29, no. 2 (June 2017), Special Issue: Un/Making Difference through Performance and Mediation in Contemporary Africa (June 2017), 166. 13 Elikia M’Bokolo and Jacob Sabakinu Kivilu eds., “Coloniser/Décoloniser L’espace : Le Paysage Urbain de Kinshasa: Entre Histoire et Mémoire,” L’Indépendance du Congo et ses lendemains 179 (2020): 277 (Tervuren: Musée Royale d’Afrique Centrale). 14 Z. S. Strother, Humor and Violence: Seeing Europeans in Central African Art (Bloomington: ­Indiana University Press, 2016), 4. 15 T. K. Biaya, La Peinture Populaire Comme Mode D’action Politique des Classes Dominées au Zaïre, 1960–1989 (Bozeman: Montana State University, 1990), 341. 16 Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, “Mobutu’s Disease’: A Social History of AIDS in Kinshasa,” Review of African Political Economy, 29 (2002): 93–94, 561–573. 17 Grundfest Schoepf, op. cit., 563. 18 For a discussion of care in the health system, see Cynthia Fleury, Le Soin est un Humanisme. ­Collections Tracts (Paris : Gallimard, 2019). 19 In the Congo of the 1990s, the frequent negation of the illness’ existence was expressed through the reinvention of the words at the origin of the AIDS acronym, SIDA in French: “Syndrome inventé pour décourager les amoureux,” that translates as “Invented syndrome to discourage lovers.” 20 Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (New York: Columbia university Press, 2021), 43–44. 21 The French historian Pierre Nora is famous for this series of volumes listing and conceptualizing the main monuments, places, and symbols that have shaped French identity throughout history. The “places of memory” are material or immaterial elements which played a role in the constitution of the collective identity and can give birth to competing memories. This series of works remains a reference in cultural history and established Nora as an essential figure in the community of historians. 22 Abacost is an acronym of the phrase a bas le costume or “down with the suit” in French. It is a short-sleeved suit worn with an ascot rather than a neck-tie. 23 Dirk Dumon, op. cit. 24 Similarly to post-communist Germany’s “ostalgia”—a selective longing for the era that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall—post-colonial Africa has sometimes been touched by a romanticization of the colonial past, exacerbated by contemporary economic, political and social hardships. 25 Guy Duplat, “Le Maïtre des Maquettes,” La Libre Belgique, April 2, 2003. 26 Francesco Bonami, “Invisibleville: The Work of Bodys Isek Kingelez,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 10 (Spring/Summer 1999): 13. 27 Édouard Glissant, Philosophie de la Relation (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). See also Michael Wiedorm, Think like an Archipelago: Paradox in the Work of Édouard Glissant (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017). 28 MPR are the initials of “Mouvement pour la Révolution,” i.e. Movement for the Revolution. 29 For a discussion of the popularized idea of care as a guiding principle in the contemporary and interconnected world, see The Care Collective. Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segal, The Care Manifesto. The Politics of Interdependence (London and New York: Verso Books, 2020). 30 James Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 267–296.

Selected Bibliography Biaya, T. K. La Peinture Populaire Comme Mode D’action Politique des Classes Dominées au Zaïre, 1960–1989. Bozeman, Mont: Montana State University. Department of Modern Languages, 1990, 334–351.

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Sandrine Colard Brooke, Grundfest Schoepf. “‘Mobutu’s Disease’: A Social History of AIDS in Kinshasa.” Review of African Political Economy 29: 93–94 (2002): 561–573. Dafatri, Fereshteh. Project 59: Architecture as Metaphor: James Casebere ... [et Al.]. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1997. Dumon, Dirk. “Une Ville Repensée,” 30 min, Piksa, 2003. Édouard Glissant. Philosophie de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. Lagae, Johan, and Jacob Sabakinu Kivilu. “Coloniser/Décoloniser L’espace : Le Paysage Urbain de Kinshasa : Entre Histoire et Mémoire.” L’indépendance du Congo et ses Lendemains, edited by Elikia M’Bokolo and Jacob Sabakinu Kivilu. vol. 179. Tervuren: Musée Royal d’Afrique Centrale, 2020, 273–290. Mbembe, Achille. Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Mignolo, Walter, and Catherine E. Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2018. Pype, Katrien. “Dancing to the Rythm of Léopoldville.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 29, no. 2 (June 2017). Special Issue: Un/Making Difference through Performance and Mediation in ­Contemporary Africa. Strother, Z. S. Humor and Violence: Seeing Europeans in Central African Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Suzuki, Sarah. Bodys Isek Kingelez. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018.

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7 DECOLONIZING LA REVOLUCIÓN Cuban Artistic Practice in a Liminal Space María de Lourdes Mariño Fernández

Padilla’s Shadow: Intellectuals In and Out of the Revolution The title of this chapter is deceptive. This is my intention; its ambition describes the same contradictions that a process like the Cuban revolution of 1959 has attempted to solve unsuccessfully. The Cuban revolution of 1959, known to many as just the Cuban Revolution or La Revolución, was the armed struggle that defeated the dictatorship of Fulgencio ­Batista on January 1, 1959. Although the struggle was led by several collectives with different ideologies, Fidel Castro was recognized as its leader and was effectively in power from 1959 to 2008. During its first years, La Revolución was an anticolonial movement, particularly against the history of US imperialism on the island; soon it also became interested in a transformation of the subjectivity of the Cubans that remained in the country. The ambition to create the New Man1 has an uneasy history of internal violence. La Revolución’s attempts at fabricating a subjectivity permanently aligned to its power commands is part of the fabric of its own coloniality. Decolonizing La Revolución could only be an oxymoron if the revolutionary event, the historical instance where the structural order is modified dramatically, continues its transformation without end, never setting the ground for a permanent legal structure. Even in the most successful scenarios, however, as soon as the new order establishes a permanent form of power, the revolution is an event of the past, and it becomes a narrative, an account of actions reflecting the new power dynamics. In this regard, decolonizing the Cuban revolution of 1959 should engage in the process of unraveling the narrative and critiquing the institutional infrastructure that has perpetuated the Cuban state’s political power over the last 60 years. A crucial component of the narrative associated with the Cuban revolution of 1959 is a formal and pragmatic understanding of violence, the revolutionary violence, which compounds an act of aggression connected to specific discursive rhetoric. According to Walter Benjamin, this violence reflects the sacred root of any hope in social transformation.2 As Enrique Dussel pointed out, those groups that defy domination and oppression are entitled to the only sublime form of violence, la violencia revolucionaria, the only violence equated to an idea of divine power in its attempt to save through destruction.3 Continuing 117

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Benjamin’s crucial distinction between legitimated rights upheld and maintained through violent structures and a divine call for justice, revolutions continue to be the burning fire, the possibility to break through legal forms of control into other forms of justice not considered by the law as it is. Differentiating from the legal violence that maintains certain rights for specific populations, divine violence destroys to redeem, humiliates to save, losing the physicality of its subjects in its own display of power. Consequentially, through the force of revolutionary power, every disruption in society’s order would have a theological argumentation behind it that would prevent personal responsibility. How could we possibly argue with divine power? Could something as mundane as decolonizing be applied against the divinely articulated revolutionary force? Even if we didn’t buy into the rhetoric of divinity, in the case of Cuba, the power dynamics of Cuban society throughout 1968 and particularly after 1971 reveal not exactly the new legal institutionalism but the impossibility of a legal structure greater than La Revolución itself. In this regard, the event we called the Cuban revolution of 1959 has transformed over the decades, preserving its sublime rhetoric of liberation or more specifically, its particular form of fetishization, intact. Cuban-American Coco Fusco’s art video, Padilla’s Shadow (2021), commemorating the 50th anniversary of Heberto Padilla’s guilty confession after 35 days of imprisonment, places what I am calling the process of fetishization of La Revolución in full display. Padilla was a Cuban poet forced to repudiate his work while pledging himself to the will of the Cuban revolution in 1971. Fusco’s video uses the format of the internationally famous Noticiero ICAIC4 (ICAIC newsreels) to represent the written speech Padilla addressed to his comrades at the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC). The video also presents the subsequent interventions during the assembly through the voices of young artists and intellectuals living in Cuba and abroad, many of whom are or have been persecuted by the state security in Cuba. Fusco’s restaging of the meeting brings to the current cultural scenario in Cuba the question that has entrapped generations of Cuban artists: ¿Quién está dentro o fuera de la revolución? (Who is in or out of the Cuban revolution?) This interrogation has been consistently used to determine who is a genuine revolutionary artist within the context of the radical transformation of society claimed by the Cuban state. Fidel C ­ astro’s Palabras a los Intelectuales (“Words to the Intellectuals”) in 19615 provided guidelines to identify who should be considered part of the revolution, specifically in the field of the arts. The assertion Dentro de la revolución todo, en contra de la revolución nada (Within the revolution everything, against the revolution nothing) has served as a blanket statement to argue in favor or against different artistic discourses over the following decades. Even though later in the same paragraph Castro acknowledged the revolution’s right to exist above any other right, this statement has served many cultural bureaucrats to advocate for a form of aesthetic freedom within the political limits enforced by the Cuban state. The debate around Padilla’s censorship in 1971 became a classic example of the political limits of any artistic discourse in post-1959 Cuba. The reinforcement of the revolution as an “out of this world” event that could not be challenged or argued about was the ultimate consequence of it. During the 1970s, Cuban society became structurally constrained to the demands of the Communist Party. As a result, the decoloniality of the social project of the Cuban revolution of 1959 soon became entrapped with its own contradictions. Its symbolic value for Latin American and African countries’ struggle against Western colonization is in contradiction to the internal power dynamics generated by the Cuban state. Therefore, 118

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to this day, it continues to be a matter of disagreement and emotional disturbance to argue with its narrative. The coloniality of the form of power implemented by the Cuban state is not visible when the legacy of the 1959 revolution is only analyzed against the imperial design of US politics toward Cuba. For many of us born, raised, and educated by the same revolutionary narrative others consider sacred, the fetishization of La Revolución has served to obscure the reality of our own lives, and to expropriate us from the right to participate in this debate.6 This game of absolute definitions, of sides that pretend not to overlap—assuming you are either in or out of the revolution—is the crack at the origin of the story, or la rajadura (the split, the abyss) “that no bridge could span,” borrowing from Gloria Anzaldúa in the “Coatlicue state.”7 Anzaldúa describes la rajadura as a nonconciliatory state of being, those who live in the abyss and bring it with them wherever they go. It is the binary represented by Caliban and Ariel taken into a singular emotional expression, the split. However, as María Lugones has indicated, the split, the space where decolonial thinking and living could take place, cannot become “an infinite repetition of dichotomous hierarchies.”8 Here, the split is part of the intimacy that allows forms of resistance not immediately visible. This is a form of “interwoven social life among people who are not acting as representatives or officials.”9 The liminality of this fractured space/being becomes a decolonial strategy within the practice of inhabiting the borderlands, where the “liminality of the border is a ground.”10 Within the history of the island, the Cuban revolution of 1959 has turned into the split, and the borders of this abyss are policed by opposing ideological narratives in perpetual battle. Inhabiting the abyss, or surviving in the split, has become the creative and political strategy of a group of artists and intellectuals raised by the dying myth of a Third World socialist revolution. The boundaries of this process lie in a terrain sometimes a-legal,11 others criminal; perhaps the best term is “liminal” because it expands in the threshold of political change occurring at the borders of Cuban institutional life. The peculiarity of the current scenario is that, through social media, the discussion around the political role of artists, which for decades was enclosed within the official institutional life of the country, has become an open civic discussion. The artists’ collectives International Institute of Artivism Hannah Arendt (INSTAR), the San Isidro Movement (MSI), and 27N have been crucial in creating the space for this open civic discussion within the last five years in Cuba. The possibility of gathering a community around dissent and the alliances that grow in-between has become a common strategy for them. Nevertheless, the precarity of INSTAR, MSI, and 27N is a result of their inhabiting the no-place of what became institutionally impossible in revolutionary Cuba; this is the likelihood of a cultural movement disassociated from the institutionalized liberatory narrative enthroned by the revolution in 1959. The strategies of survival within the split are transitory; many get crushed by the state violence and others get consumed by the vicious cycles of international politics. Today, it is uncertain for how long INSTAR, MSI, and 27N will continue breathing through the split.

In the Nuclear City: INSTAR, MSI, and 27N INSTAR was founded by Tania Bruguera in 2015 after a 100-hour performance reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. It began as a public action to raise attention about the political harassment against Bruguera and her collaborators, following 119

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a violent crackdown on Bruguera’s campaign #YoTambienExijo intending to restage the performance Tatlin’s Whisper #6 in the iconic Revolution Square in Havana.12 Before founding INSTAR, Tania Bruguera was already the living Cuban artist best represented in the international art world. Bruguera was also highly regarded in Cuba by the official cultural bureaucracy despite having two of her more important pieces censored by the state security in 1993 and 2000.13 Bruguera was part of the privileged troupe of Cuban artists who could travel freely and were allowed to criticize the country’s politics without being physically persecuted. The institutional politics associated with this line of art and artists in Cuba developed within a strict distinction between socially engaged art and activism. This generation of Cuban artists, who mostly graduated in the late 1980s and early 1990s from the University of the Arts (ISA), would limit their social interventions to specific communities without any implications of real political change.14 For Bruguera, crossing that behavioral line meant she had to step out of the support of the cultural institutional system to produce her own set of rules, transforming her role from a performance artist to the coordinator of an independent institution. This shift was widely criticized by government officials and the Cuban art world, who did not recognize this activity as being legitimately motivated. In leaving the self-contained Cuban art scene to begin an independent institutional role, Bruguera turned away from the state-controlled spaces of cultural production. The founding of INSTAR in 2015 was, therefore, the beginning of the shift in her public status on the island. Since the endorsement of Decree 349 in 2018, the presence of independent institutions in Cuba was declared illegal. As a result, independent cultural activities previously held under a-legal conditions became illegal. Decree 349 criminalizes independent cultural workers who are not linked to any of the official state institutions. The penalties associated with this new regulation range from high fines to seizing property, including private homes. The mere existence of INSTAR poses a risky exercise in institutional critique of the entire cultural system in Cuba. INSTAR’s mission statement declares that “the institute will be a center for civic literacy in Cuba” mimicking the goal of the 1961 literacy campaign led by the revolutionary government for eight months.15 In this sense, INSTAR’s institutional critique has a mirroring effect in relation to state power in Cuba. Bruguera’s ambition to connect not just with art students but with the everyday citizen to engage in a meaningful discussion about Cuban society moves her project into the dreaded field of political activism on the island. Additionally, the institute assumes the role of the government in providing a safety net of economic and promotional support to independent artists, poets, filmmakers, and intellectuals at a time during which state support has waned significantly. In other words, INSTAR is not only promoting a discourse usually censored by the state but also advancing the possibility of a non-centralized society, in which the singularity of the institutional model of revolutionary Cuba is left behind. Astonished by the unpredictable transgression of Bruguera, the political narrative of the cultural bureaucracy has been to devalue her privileged status as an international Cuban artist formed by the schools of the Cuban revolution to that of a criminal dissident. In contrast with the more elite concept of culture displayed in the conception of INSTAR, the San Isidro Movement (MSI) came from a marginalized fringe of Cuban society excluded from the official institutional system. Understanding the causes and the nature of MSI’s exclusion from the cultural sphere on the island has become crucial to questioning the effectiveness of the Cuban state in addressing structural racism in the country. Being a majoritarian Black collective locally grounded in the overpopulated and impoverished San 120

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Isidro neighborhood in Old Havana, MSI has highlighted the disparities in access to artistic education, among others, in contemporary Cuba. Its combination of political activism with community engagement has made MSI’s performances a continuous target of the Cuban police. Although MSI came to be known as such in 2018 after leading the campaign against Decree 349, the event that launched artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara (leader of the group) and curator Yanelys Nuñez was the #00Bienal (May 5–15, 2018). As an attempt to exercise a counter-narrative story, the #00Bienal was a successful initiative that positioned Alcántara and Nuñez at the foreground of the Cuban contemporary art movement in its capacity to gather the support of established as well as emerging artists. The plan to organize an independent biennial right at the time when the official 13th Havana Biennial was postponing its program represented a shift to not exactly challenge the validity of the traditional event but the lack of space for other initiatives. After the devastation provoked by Hurricane Irma in 2017, which prompted the government’s decision to postpone the 13th Havana Biennial due to lack of funding, the #00Bienal was calling for an autonomous event asking artists to open exhibition spaces in their own homes and studios, a common practice during the official Havana Biennial, but this time, understanding the event as a separate entity from the state. The #00Bienal intended to contribute to a cultural and political debate reshaping the narrative of La Revolución by performing its ownership of one of the dearest state-supported events on the island: La Bienal de la Habana. In this regard, the #00Bienal was a wise reappropriation of the national narrative, symbolic, and at the same time fiercely political. A few months later, the MSI would be founded, leading the political unrest in the country toward a confrontation that develops at the intersection of race, class, and the hope for social justice. Over the following years, MSI proposed an art practice destined not to transcend but to disappear in society, as Afro-Cuban performance artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara has declared in numerous interviews. Alcántara’s understanding of art represents a turning point in the production and consumption of art in Cuba. His performances dare to subvert the politically acceptable behavior imposed by the cultural institutions in Cuba since 1959. The local debate around who has the right to recognize MSI’s work as a valid expression of Cuban culture would not be surprising if the absolute monopoly of this category, Cuban culture, was not one of the best ideological fictions deployed and exported by the Cuban cultural bureaucracy. The artists, intellectuals, and poets grouped around MSI are challenging the narrative of a Cuban revolutionary culture always in agreement with government institutions. The case of Alcántara is quite remarkable. Despite being a self-taught artist—which presents a considerable disadvantage in Cuban society where only state-sanctioned professionals are recognized—who spent years struggling to bring attention to his practice, he has become an icon for artists and intellectuals in Cuba and abroad. With his talent and candor, he has connected—his most repeated phrase is Estamos conectados (We are connected)— the struggles of everyday Cubans to an artistic debate that entails racial justice and political power. Inhabiting the public space as a platform for his projects, Alcántara has initiated artistic actions that challenge the traditional understanding between art and politics on the island. His first project to gain widespread recognition was the Cuban Museum of Dissent (2016–present).16 It began as a website to gather information about dissident figures in Cuban history, using the indigenous leader Hatuey, the nineteenth-century national hero José Martí, a young Fidel Castro, and the important dissident Oswaldo Payá together in 121

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its visual design. Here, Alcántara addresses the cultural taboo around the word “dissident” and challenges the official dehumanization of dissidents in the historical narrative established after 1959. Moving on from its initial website, this project has become a more ambitious performance grounded in a physical space, Damas 955, an address in the San Isidro neighborhood of Old Havana, where art exhibitions and community gatherings occur. This space is the one in which MSI performs its independence from the institutionalized Cuban revolutionary culture. Cuban Museum of Dissent plays an unconventional institutional role as a complex community not structured according to a traditional non-governmental organization (NGO) framework, in comparison to INSTAR, for example, which is not effectively an NGO yet but complies with its regular infrastructure. The Museum of Dissent does not store objects or even information but instead houses action, movement, and behavior that rebels against any form of coercion that expropriates the community’s right to be seen and heard. In this sense, it functions more like what Judith Butler would call a political assemblage that redefines collaboration and visibility for those who dwell in traditionally considered “pre-political spaces.”17 This is how a particular neighborhood, San Isidro, has become the “space of appearance”18 for that fringe of Cuban society consistently neglected. Those “marginals,” as it is referred to in the Cuban press, in need of reeducation and integration into the institutional system, have transformed their behavior into a liberatory experimentation of political independence. In this sense, the MSI represents a radical form of cultural and political self-affirmation. It cannot be divided into ideological factions; it is the alliance that respects the value of dissent. In Butler’s words, Together they exercise the performative power to lay claim to the public in a way that is not yet codified into law and that can never be fully codified into law. And this performativity is not only speech, but the demands of bodily action, gesture, movement, congregation, persistence, and exposure to possible violence.19 The MSI has started this process of liberation in directing to the body’s limitation and precarity the space of political assertion. Alcántara’s repeated hunger strikes are one of his many attempts to preserve his independence in front of Cuban state power. Facebook Live videos and public performances by hip-hop musician Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo also form part of the defiant displays that characterize MSI, another reason why they have been constantly persecuted.20 The confluence between hip hop, public performances, graffiti, and visual arts gave birth to a new iconic figure of rebellion: Black, self-taught, and underprivileged. MSI’s coalitional nature is a compelling call for an understanding of decoloniality as a movement that happens, in Lugones’s words, within the tense “multiplicity in the fracture of the locus.”21 This is a space where coloniality pervades but a subaltern “self-inrelation”22 persists. MSI is less about the articulation of a discursive reflexivity against the Cuban state and more about the interconnectivity that their coalitions promote. In doing so, MSI gives voice to those who were not politically integrated into the Cuban revolution of 1959 but who, paradoxically, have been at the center of its liberatory storyline. Alcántara’s public performances insist on the inherent class and racial division of a sector of Cuban society that does not have access to a hierarchical “revolutionary culture” and has thus created its own.23 MSI’s precarious existence delineates the racial inequalities that continue to pervade Cuban society (Figure 7.1).24

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Figure 7.1  Screenshot of Maykel Osorbo’s Instagram account showing the musician still with a handcuff after escaping police detention with the help of San Isidro neighbors (Havana, April 4, 2021).

The centrality of race in MSI’s ongoing struggle becomes clearer when compared to its homologue 27N—the name references the date November 27. Following the night of November 26, 2020, when a collective hunger strike by members and allies of MSI was violently dismantled by state agents, hundreds of artists and intellectuals gathered in front of the Ministry of Culture in unprecedented solidarity with MSI, asking for the end of political persecution and the right to freedom of expression and assembly. With 27N representing the “legit” community of artists educated by the public educational system created after 1959, which offers considerable social and economic advantages, the contrast to MSI is noteworthy. The relationship between these sectors of the contemporary cultural scene in Cuba is not an artistic collaboration or a shared community project but part of an understanding of art and activism as complementary spheres. Furthermore, it is an alliance that trespasses the structural inequalities at the heart of Cuban society, advocating for a space where this struggle is not continuously erased by the Cuban state. In close association with INSTAR and MSI, 27N has developed a network of civic activism that challenges the traditional assumption that the art produced in Cuba supports the current political regime. Through the implementation of various projects, ranging from art strikes to symbolic withdrawals of the cultural patrimony of the island, 27N is performing an avant-gardist rebellion against the neutralizing political effect of official galleries and state regulations (Figure 7.2).

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Figure 7.2  27N Artistas E Intelectuales Libres (27N Free Artists and Intellectuals). Image courtesy of the author, designed by Claudia Patricia Pérez Olivera.

In a manifesto released on April 12th 2021,25 the members of 27N presented themselves as a civic organization or movement rather than a political party. They declared that their main tools are artistic and intellectual creations. Their work strategy as a collective space for cultural and political action has repurposed the meaning of many artistic landmarks of Cuban revolutionary culture. Many of 27N’s strategies participate in what Gene Ray defines as the anti-capitalist vector of the avant-garde—in this case, the group’s disassociation from the commodification of ideologies that the Cuban revolution represents has become their best strategy to fight a public space of enunciation not absorbed by the rationale of the institutional politics of the Cuban state.26 INSTAR, MSI, and 27N have created a different context for Cuban contemporary art. Although the three exemplify diverse interests, they reinforce an idea of the artist as someone with a civic responsibility within a social context. In the case of INSTAR, its institutional structure demands a bureaucratic system that runs parallel to the state in its attempt to promote and economically support art events, intellectual production, and civic workshops. MSI relies less on the institutional infrastructure and more on the community outside the art world to create an artistic dynamic of empowerment for the socially displaced in Cuba. 27N functions as an interface between the art world and Cuban society, raising awareness of the political implications of artistic production and asking for a clear civic stand when the rights of activists and artists are being consistently violated by the state. Although the artist’s role differs among these three platforms, they all engage in the tense movement that characterizes the fight of decoloniality. I want to hold with Lugones that these are “people moving.”27 Through INSTAR, MSI, and 27N, “the tension between the dehumanization and paralysis of the coloniality of being, and the creative activity of being”28 comes as the possibility of inhabiting that grounded space of the borderlands. It is a being in tension, fractured but resisting in the in-between where it dwells. 124

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Conclusion: We Have Torn the Silence In 2014, poet Katherine Bisquet, a member of 27N and a participant in the collective hunger strike by MSI during November 2020, wrote a poem titled “Ciudad Nuclear mon amour” (Nuclear City Mon Amour)29 dedicated to Ciudad Nuclear in the province of ­Cienfuegos, where she was born. The town was intended as a site for the production of nuclear ­electric power on the island, and most of the people who still live in the town were educated in the Soviet Union to later engage in the construction of the plant. The project ­eventually collapsed in 1989. Bisquet’s poem reflects on the traumatic memories and the emptiness ­experienced by the generations that came after the failure of the plant construction. A ­ ttempting to grasp the inability to tell this story, “Ciudad Nuclear mon amour” ­portrays the enforcement of silence as a political and existential coercion technique. This poem/town prefigures the island and its borders together with the void of the people trapped in between. One of the videos of the public demonstrations in Havana on July 11, 2021, shows an elderly woman screaming at the camera, “Nos quitamos el ropaje del silencio” (We are taking off the clothing of silence). In the video, she briefly speaks about the lies, fears, and broken promises of the state, with her back toward the capitol building. The space inhabited by the rebellion of July 11 is as fragmentary and precarious as any of the artistic groups presented here. The strategies of disruption of the official revolutionary narratives, institutionalized in Cuba after 1959, that INSTAR, MSI, and 27N have implemented, function less according to the design of an alternative counternarrative and more as the enactment of liminal spaces of coalitions across the social borders of cultural and political institutions in Cuba. Yet, INSTAR, MSI, and 27N are the target of criticism by the international left because they do not comply with their ideological alignment. Additionally, they are politically abused by the extreme right-wing opposition to the Cuban government who conveniently reads any manifestation against the official power as support for their political program for the island. The fact that these artistic practices do not adapt to the political debate that has informed the dynamic of Cuban politics is another factor that reinforces their precarity. The liminality of these groups’ political stance is marked by levels of exclusion that are always ideological and, in differing degrees, economically and racially specified. Finding creative strategies of alliance, INSTAR, MSI, and 27N perform the multiplicity of beings at the crossroads, battling the practice of coloniality at a deeply emotional and pragmatic level. By undoing the colonial behavior that imposes a singular cultural narrative, these collectives perform a discrete decolonial twist of our traditional understanding of Cuban art. Again, Alcántara’s emphatic statement “estamos conectados” reverberates as the best practice to overcome decades of distrust. Finally, there is still nothing commodifiable or ideologically assertive about INSTAR’s, MSI’s, and 27N’s practices. Instead, they insist on defying any form of political power that disfigures the humanity of diverse forms of knowledge and being.

Notes 1 In the case of Cuba, the program for the creation of the New Man was conceived by Ernesto Che Guevara. See, Ernesto Che Guevara, El Socialismo y el Hombre Nuevo (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1977). 2 Walter Benjamin, “Toward the critique of violence,” in Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition, ed. Peter Fenves and Julia Ng (39–62) (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021).

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María de Lourdes Mariño Fernández 3 Enrique Dussel, “Reflexiones sobre “Hacia la crítica de la violencia” de Walter Benjamin,” in ­Benjamin y las Encrucijadas de la Violencia, edited by Diego Lizaraza Arias and José Alberto Sanchez (México: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Número Especial, 2012), 52–53. 4 ICAIC stands for Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry. 5 “I believe that this is quite clear. What are the rights of revolutionary or non-revolutionary writers and artists? Within the revolution everything, against the revolution, no rights at all.” (Applause.) (Fidel Castro, 1961) http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1961/19610630.html 6 See Rafael Rojas, Tumbas sin Sosiego. Revolución, Disidencia y Exilio del Intelectual Cubano (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006). Also, Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption and Resistance 1959–1971 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 7 Gloria Anzaldúa, “La herencia de Coatlicue/The Coatlicue state,” in Borderlands: The New ­Mestiza = La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 45. 8 María Lugones, “Toward a decolonial feminism,” Hypatia 25, 4 (2010): 753. 9 Ibid., 743. 10 Ibid., 753. 11 The word a-legal means not legal or illegal. It is informally used in Cuba to indicate the status of independent curators and artists. 12 Tatlin’s Whisper is a series of performances in which Bruguera re-enacts oppression circumstances to activate citizens’ responsibility. Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (2009) took place in the Contemporary Art Center Wifredo Lam during the 10th Havana Biennial. 13 The independent newspaper Memoria de la Posguerra (1993) was censored by the Cuban government and Bruguera’s own father who was an important diplomat and representative of the Cuban state abroad. Untitled (Havana 2000), a performance where videos of Fidel Castro were used, was censored during the 7th Havana Biennial after a few hours of its opening. 14 Coco Fusco refers to this circumstance as the behavioral agreement with cultural institutions in postrevolutionary Cuba. See Coco Fusco, Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), 75. 15 https://instar.org/menu.php?m=m1&path=pag/instituto/instar-mision-es.html 16 The Cuban Museum of Dissent was designed in collaboration with art historian Yanelys Núñez. https://museodeladisidenciaencuba.org/contact-us/. 17 Judith Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 76. 18 Ibid., 72. 19 Ibid., 75. 20 During the public demonstrations of July 11, 2021 Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara was incarcerated. Maykel Osorbo was imprisoned after performing on the streets of San Isidro on April 4, 2021, the hip-hop hit “Patria y Vida” censored by the state. As of the date of this chapter, they remain in jail. 21 María Lugones, “Toward a decolonial feminism,” Hypatia 25, 4 (2010): 754. 22 Ibid., 754. 23 For a discussion around politically acceptable behavior and the role of decency in cultural appreciation see Jaquelin Loss, “Socialism with Bling: Aspiration, decency, and exclusivity in contemporary Cuba,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 30, 2 (2020): 291–310. Also, for more information about the role of public space in contemporary Cuban art see Paloma Duong, “Homebound: The art of public space in contemporary cuba,” ARTMargins 6, 2 (2017): 27–49. 24 See Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 25 https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/389547/27n-manifesto/. 26 See Gene Ray, “Avant-Gardes as anti-capitalist vector,” Third Text 21, 3 (2007): 241–255. 27 María Lugones, “Toward a decolonial feminism” Hypatia 25, 4 (2010): 754. 28 Ibid., 754. 29 “Ciudad Nuclear mon amour” was included in the book Algo aquí se descompone (Something rots here) in 2014 by Collection Sur, Cuba. It was recently published and translated into English by the Cuban independent publisher Ediciones Sinsentido (2020).

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Selected Bibliography Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 2012. Benjamin, Walter. “Toward the critique of violence.” In Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition, edited by Peter Fenves and Julia Ng (39–62). Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. Butler, Judith. Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Dussel, Enrique. “Reflexiones sobre “Hacia la crítica de la violencia” de Walter Benjamin.” In Benjamin y las Encrucijadas de la Violencia, edited by Diego Lizarazo Arias and José Alberto Sánchez Martínez (52–53). México: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2012. Fuente, Alejandro de la. A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth Century Cuba. Chapel Hill; London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Fusco, Coco. Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba. London: Tate Publishing, 2015. Guerra, Lillian. Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption and Resistance 1959–1971. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Lugones, María. “Toward a decolonial feminism.” Hypatia, 25, 4 (2010): 753. Ray, Gene. “Avant-gardes as anti-capitalist vector.” Third Text, 21, 3 (2007): 241–255. Rojas, Rafael. Tumbas Sin Sosiego. Revolución, Disidencia y Exilio del Intelectual Cubano. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006.

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8 MUSEUMS ARE TEMPLES OF WHITENESS Sumaya Kassim

As I stand in the British Museum, I people watch. I watch how white visitors treat Other people. I examine the way objects have been presented to us. I feel the whiteness: as ideology, as property, as belief system, as legal apparatus, as spiritual cause. The words from an Eunsong Kim poem comes to me: “deliver us from whiteness/from its benevolent privatization/deliver us from the anecdotal rapture/was yesterday not also the apocalypse.”1 I walk through the hallowed halls and I see white upturned faces. How can it be that we occupy the same space and yet occupy completely different timelines, different realities? There are the statues and then there are these buildings. This building, that houses corpses of the colonised and not the coloniser, that contains loot from those conquered, that desecrates the sacred traditions and objects of others, this place. I recognise in these buildings systems at work that are cumulative. They operate together like an organised religion: institutions venerate the actions that produce whiteness, such as white men, their ideologies, and collude to hide and disguise exploitation, theft and genocide performed in the name of whiteness. Museums are temples of whiteness. The first half of this statement is not controversial. Many scholars have pointed out that museums are temples. Most notably, museologist Carol Duncan suggests that museums are secular temples to resolve the apparent tension between secularism and the temple-like qualities of the museum. She argues that visitors of the museum are silently petitioned to accept museums as civic buildings founded on the Enlightenment values of reason, rationality, beauty and order, whilst also being sites of worship and belief.2 She writes: The distinction, rooted in Enlightenment struggles against authoritarian religious doctrines, makes religious truth a matter of subjective belief, while the truths belonging to museums, universities, or courts of law claim to be self-evident to reason, rooted in experience, and empirically verifiable. According to this tradition, we think of religious truth as addressed to particular groups of voluntary believers, while secular truth has the status of objective or universal knowledge and functions in our society as a higher, authoritative truth.3 DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-11 128

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To this end, many of us distinguish between churches and temples as religious sites and “museums, courthouses, or state capitols” and “[w]e associate different kind of truths with each kind of site.” Today, the “truth” museums provide is designed to educate their visitors on what it means to be part of a public or political collective. They do this by narrating a story of the nation that homogenises the history of the nation and celebrates it. This is often a hopeful narrative that may acknowledge that the nation was formed through brutality, cruelty and exploitation in the past, but that it now embodies modern principles of democracy, diversity and change.4 As such, museums and other secular institutions are meant to bind the community as a whole into the civic body by “identifying its highest values, its proudest memories, and its truest truths.”5 Though Duncan’s work on museums as temples is important, it uncritically relies on secularism as an ideal. She argues that art museums are secular because of the scientific knowledge they contain, but also because of their role as “preservers of the community’s cultural heritage.”6 Duncan suggests that when we recognis\ze the ritualistic, indeed religious, nature of secularism we can begin to conceptualise the “hidden” or “disguised … ritual content of secular ceremonies.”7 However, secularism as a universal and neutral value is contested both historically and theoretically. For instance, as a Muslim living in England, I am keenly aware of how secularism is used as a measure to compare my humanity or civility with white subjects of all religions or none. Being Muslim, which is ostensibly a set of beliefs, becomes a racialised experience against the white, secular backdrop of England. Throughout this chapter, I explore the relationship between secularism and race as it manifests in modern cultural institutions. To this end, we should be alert to what the word “secularism” is doing in this context. Secularism is meant to function here as a kind of neutral backdrop, a white slate, where objects and, indeed, people from around the world, of any background, can entre and be interpolated into the civic body. Those of us who feel whiteness are experiencing what for white people is the “hidden” or “disguised” ritual content. Museum curation are sets of rituals that erase the conditions of possibility that create them; curation creates a fantasy of modernity, a utopia that emerged and emerges without exploitative labour and violence, where the visitor can imagine themselves belonging in beauty and wholeness.8 Museums are not secular temples. They are temples of whiteness. In arguing that museums are temples of whiteness, I am articulating and concretising this feeling – this feeling of having our imaginations curtailed, of being diverted from colonial realities by the dramas of white innocence and redemption. This is not simply an experience of exclusion, micro-aggression or even being written out of history, though it can involve all of these things. It is the specific sensation of being surrounded by those who hold deeply held beliefs about superiority, entitlement to wealth and redemption and a right to history. These beliefs are never narrated as a coherent system held by a collective, but always as an individual experience, one which privileges the joy of individual redemption through notions of empathy or education. There are several thinkers whose work helps articulate whiteness in this context. In his essay “The Souls of White Folk,” sociologist and writer W. E. B. Du Bois argues that modernity emerged through the “discovery of personal whiteness … a very modern thing – a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.”9 His essay captures the paradox and irony that this “new religion of whiteness” whose doctrine is that “of all the hues of God, whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness and tan” is entirely reliant on war, exploitation and dehumanisation.10 Scholar Reiland Rabaka glosses Du 129

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Bois’s argument: “At the heart of the history of white supremacy, as quiet as it is kept, is a ­prolonged practice and promotion of an extremely acute form of cultural racism and cultural theft.”11 For Du Bois, modernity and colonialism are two sides of the same coin. Later in this chapter, I consider race and secularism through philosophers Denise F ­ erreira Da Silva and Sylvia Wynter whose works interrogate the history of science and medieval history, respectively. Through their respective works, I consider how the invention of man in modernity is the invention of race and, crucially, how museums continue to create these categories. Philosopher Sara Ahmed’s essay “The Phenomenology of Whiteness” is also key. She examines how whiteness is an “ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they ‘take up’ space.”12 She shows how whiteness is spatial and phenomenological, i.e., how whiteness relates to the future. She writes: “We can consider how whiteness becomes worldly as an effect of reification. Reification is not then something we do to whiteness, but something whiteness does, or to be more precise, what allows whiteness to be done.”13 An artist who has helped me think through whiteness as religion is Nicholas Galanin, who is of Tlingit and Unangax̂ descent and a citizen of the Sitka Tribe of Alaska. His piece White Noise, American Prayer Rug (2018) concretises the nature of white noise as a textile to be prayed on.14 It is also a visual representation of white noise, the static sound produced by televisions, which here can be read as a metaphor for white ignorance. The rug suggests a relationship about space, race and the sacred; whiteness is everywhere and so we cannot hear or touch it, and yet, for some of us, it is all we hear and it is as textured and tactile as textile. The piece also highlights the relationship between white ignorance – the white noise – and white salvation and innocence (Figure 8.1).

Figure 8.1  Nicholas Galanin, White Noise, American Prayer Rug, 2020 wool and cotton 60 × 96 inches (152.4  × 243.8  cm). Courtesy of Nicholas Galanin and Peter Blum Gallery, New York.

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When I say that museums are temples of whiteness, I am knowingly upsetting the table: I am suggesting museums are not neutral, that they are not secular, that they are racialised and that I see it happening even as I am being told it is not happening.15 It is one thing to suggest museums are racist, but to suggest that they are altars to white Gods, is knowing: it drives against the claim that museums are secular, neutral or aspiritual. It suggests that claims to rationality and objective education are partial. There is a form of knowledge to be gained through the cognitive dissonance produced by perceiving ourselves through the eyes of the imperial gaze in the museum cabinet whilst also watching those racialised as white consuming the museum’s offerings. My interest is in this triangulation: viewing myself, viewing myself as represented in the white communal temple, and the way those racialised as white consume objects and my personhood simultaneously. Many of us experience museums as sites of trauma, theft and injustice. Scholars, museum visitors and activists from marginalised backgrounds often emphasise the trauma of visitation. This is important as validating the painful injustice of colonialism is and was imperative to our survival. However, the responses of BIPoC are often dismissed through the notion that we are emotional spectators who are incapable of producing valid interpretation or meaning. Visitation produces more than trauma as a response; rage, as has been argued by Black feminists Audre Lorde and Patricia Hill, is also an analytic tool and a departure point. Rather than accept museums as “theaters of pain,” there is much more at play when BIPoC audiences, artists and practitioners engage with museums.16 In encountering museums, we make several claims to knowledge that lies outside of the ostensibly neutral, objective gaze of the museum. We typically consider museums as sites of colonial categorisation, where flora and fauna are labelled and shelved, and where artworks are deemed culturally significant (or not so). I would like to consider classification and knowledge from a different perspective. Museums are not only where objects are put in their place, it is where we are put in our respective places. Through this saying, we understand that being put in our place is not a neutral or objective act; it is emotional, affective, it relates to hierarchy, it is bodily and physical. It is tied to powerful emotions: shame, dread and rejection. Above all, to be put in one’s place is a denial of one’s agency within the collective. Shelved, and what are you? An object to be observed, to be handled, an object that is purposefully ignored even as it speaks. There are the visitors who recognise they are being put in their place as masters. This is more than an experience of imperial nostalgia. Museums are sites which facilitate white visitors to imagine themselves as the masters of an ordered world and universe, categorised, well-lit, exhibited, everything in its place, knowable and understandable. Duncan describes museum visits as a kind of pilgrimage where the visitor may “witness a drama – often a real or symbolic sacrifice” where “often individual and alone” they follow a “prescribed route, repeating a prayer.” She writes that such rituals are “transformative” and “confers identity or purifies or restores order to the world through sacrifice, ordeal, or enlightenment.” However, interestingly, at the heart of this pilgrimage is a higher truth that is premised on “deceit”: In the museum, art history displaces history, purges it of social and political conflict, and distils it down to a series of triumphs, mostly of individual genius. Of course, what the museum presents as the community’s history, beliefs, and identity may represent only the interests and self-image of certain powers within the community. Such deceit, however, does not necessarily lessen the effectiveness of the monument’s ritual structure as such.17 131

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At their core, museums teach us to look at the world as entirely knowable and under control. They are sites of deceit, of fantasy, of delusion, in which humans do not live in a post-Edenic world, but in an Eden where we are the masters over all natural materials, of the Earth and over other human beings. In the museum, man is placed in the position of the omniscient, omnipotent God: once you’ve gone through the British Museum, you have seen all of human history. Once you have walked through the Natural History Museum, you have seen all that the Earth has to offer. These are not educational facilities; these are places of worship and, as with most temples, they instil wonder at our own nature. A piece of the divine must surely reside in each of us, the museum whispers; to walk through these hallowed halls is to experience both the divinity of our white forefathers and our own modern subjecthood. In theory, visitors re-entre the world refreshed, soul purified, redeemed. Museums are where whiteness is reified and, indeed, deified. It is here that the settler, the white soul, expands to see itself as “holding dominion over the earth and its flora and fauna, as the anthropocentric normal, and as more developed, more human, more deserving than other groups or species.”18 It is here that people learn mastery over all dominions and over all peoples. Sure, it’s a fantasy (how many white people have this kind of power?). But it is a powerful fantasy that bleeds into every aspect of our lives. In museums, we are put in our place. Though cabinets of curiosities are out of fashion, the cabinet remains: we are the butterflies pinned in place, the specimens to be sorted and labelled. In this way, museums teach us something about racism, about the futures we can and cannot imagine. They teach us about whiteness, its pervasiveness and how deeply entrenched racism truly is; they teach us about where we belong within the colonial gaze. Recognising we are being put in our place and articulating it can be empowering. Our engagements with these institutions produce another kind of knowledge, a knowledge that is knowing. To be knowing is to know too much. It evokes a young person who is deemed too precocious, to know too much too soon; to know too much is dangerous. It threatens to upturn the hierarchy. This knowingness is apparent in wider public discourse which typically centres on four inflection points: the repatriation of stolen objects to their country of origin (particularly the reluctance and refusal to do so), the politics of displaying sacred objects, the presence of human corpses in museum collections and the source of museum and art institution funding. Yet, our demands embody crimes that go beyond the dry bureaucratic legal speak of museum repatriation, crimes that go beyond the court of law, that insist on how people have been impacted spiritually, in ways that cannot be fully appreciated or accounted for. These material realities of theft and dubious or unethical sources of funding symbolise continuing injustice, violence and inequality. When we demand that stolen objects are returned, it is also a way of drawing attention to the right of return, the right of Indigenous peoples to have their lands returned, how colonialism continues, and highlighting how racially othered humans continue to be treated as inferior. There is an awareness that museum’s retain corpses and stolen sacred objects, and justify these actions by using the language of guardianship and conservation, by drawing on a power beyond Reason. Similarly, each time we accuse museums of theft, it is more than moral judgement or ethical appeal; it is a knowing awareness of what these sites actually are, what museums represent. These are temples which contain the colonisers’ hoard. Many of us recognise museums contain stolen objects, but one of the least discussed aspects of what museums have stolen are possibilities, the alternative timelines, the what could have been. Our desire for return is also a longing for the possibilities stolen from us. It is what Black scholars and poets have called an unpayable debt. America and Western 132

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Europe are places entirely founded on debt, the debt it owes to those who were enslaved. In theory, it is here, in the realm of the unpayable, the unspeakable, the impossible, that artists and poets step in to help us process the grief, bear witness and disrupt white narratives of redemption. But, as we shall see, artists are increasingly (not) engaging with cultural institutions. This refusal becomes part of exposing the truth about structural power and the relationship between whiteness, art and secularism. It is a way of attempting to exist outside of colonial value systems, outside of white ritual and tradition, outside of debt and theft. As this chapter is invoking the spiritual and unseen, it is important to recognise that gesturing towards the incorporeal is a common tactic used to dismiss the material claims made for repatriations, reparations and the return of lands to indigenous peoples. We must attend to Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s warning to remain alert at how radical discourse is metabolised by academia and the art world.19 They show how the term “decolonise” has come to function as a placeholder for various social justice causes and not for achieving indigenous sovereignty. They argue that “decolonising” is used in various contexts and show how this dilutes and distorts its radicalism; we must be wary of accepting performative “decolonial” acts over material realities. Often, the language of forgiveness and redemption enters these placeholder performances, centering white innocence and redemption. It is for this reason I have eschewed from using the term “decolonise” in favour of thinking through whiteness from a historical and an embodied perspective, paying attention to what I know through my body and experience. I too believe the term “decolonising” is being abused by cultural institutions as a consumable product. I maintain that decolonising is an impossibility as a way of wresting it from the hands of in-the-know curators and academic superstars who have made their star rise through (mis)using the term, but also from myself as a person who stands in solidarity with Indigenous peoples, Black communities and colonised societies. Decolonising is impossible is also a philosophical statement. We must attend to the material realities of decolonising, whilst also recognising that there is no going back, no return. This is not pessimistic; it is not an ending statement, but a threshold. Though there is no going back, what is at stake is the future, specifically who is allowed to imagine the future and how our imaginations are curtailed from doing so freely.

The Invention of Man Is the Invention of Race If we are to fully understand the systems we are being placed in at museums, it is imperative that we look at the roots of race science that we find in medieval Europe and examine how the ideologies produced in the high Middle Ages, particularly the emphasis on others being devil worshippers against Christ, would go on to dictate the ways in which Man is constructed in the Renaissance, and later in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.20 Histories of race are often written by academics who are disinterested in how race emerged with the category of religion and tend to focus on race as being produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Often, discussions on the relationship between race and secularism are confined to the shift from biological racism to cultural racism (as in studies about Muslims in Europe or thinking through multiculturism). Two important exceptions are philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva and historian Sylvia Wynter. Both scholars think through the histories of secularisation as a means of producing race, through showing us how the invention of man is the invention of race, which is another way of articulating that the other side of modernity (Man) is colonialism (Race as property). 133

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Wynter provides a historical account of how the invention of race can only be understood through the secularisation of Europe, particularly how the Church presided over who was pure (the clergy) and who was impure (the laity). In her magisterial essay “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” she makes a striking argument about roots of the placement of people and the power behind those placements. Specifically through ­Walter Mignolo’s discussion of the Janus face of “modernity/coloniality” and Aníbal Q ­ uijano’s statement that “idea of race” would come to be “the most efficient instrument of social domination invented in the last 500 years.” She argues that in order for the laity, including “the then ascendant modern European state,” to escape their “subordination to the world of the Church,” a new category had to be created, what Michel Foucault calls “the invention of man.” This is the Renaissance humanists’ recategorisation of the human in secular terms, outside the “theocentric, “sinful by nature” conception” of the human “on whose basis the hegemony of the Church/clergy over the lay world of Latin-Christian Europe had been supernaturally legitimated.” Wynter argues that this is the first secular or “degodded” mode of being human in history. She suggests that though this was “effected by the lay world’s invention of Man as the political subject of the state,” the language and “master code” of “symbolic life and death” would come to life through the racial logic of colonialism. She argues that this created, ‘ ‘the rise of Europe’ and its construction of the ‘world civilization’ on the one hand, and, on the other, African enslavement, [Indigenous genocide], and Asian subjugation.”21 Race is the logic that enables the West’s expansion, replacing the binaries of “mortal/­ immortal, natural/supernatural, human/the ancestors, the gods/God” that had previously configured what it is to be human, and produces a new binary, the human and the subhuman. This is the difference defined in philosopher and theologian Ginés de Sepúlveda’s sixteenth-century terms as almost a difference between “monkeys and men, homunculi and true humans.” Therefore, “race” was “the non-supernatural but no less extrahuman ground (in the reoccupied place of the traditional ancestors/gods, God, ground) of the answer that the secularizing West would now give” to the question of what we are.22 The invention of man is the invention of race. What we see in the logic of eugenics and race science is the secularisation of the language of religion. Whenever we see the terminology of scientific racism or eugenics, we should immediately think whiteness as religion. The magnitude of this shift is akin to the shift created by Copernicus’s discovery that the Earth circled the sun; the creation of man and, in particular, the centering of white man as the default of humanity and, therefore, the centre of the Universe, was epochal. The invention of a self-determined, self-sufficient and masterful being birthed the apocalypses that we now experience as reality. It is museums that are the temples of this belief system. How else would one describe buildings that are filled with loot and bodies, sacrifices not to God but to the idea and dream of whiteness? How else would one describe a building that houses workers who guard the community’s soul? Da Silva begins A Global Theory of Race with Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman, the ­figure who famously proclaims that God is dead and that “we have killed him.”23 Nietzsche writes: God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him … How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of 134

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atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? […] What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?24 Da Silva suggests that what the madman knows – “and what the audience do not want to hear” – is that Reason, civilisation’s “great accomplishment” that “instituted man, the Subject, also foreshadowed his eventual demise.” God is dead. And it is we who killed him. The madman asks: “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” and “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?” We killed God. Then, we replaced him. Then, we built architectures of secular modernity, of which museums are the epitome. Nietzsche put these proclamations in the mouth of a madman, an Other to Reason, to further the dramatic irony of these statements. The madman’s protestations diagnose modernity as carnivalesque. He points out the topsy-turviness of modern man, how in instituting himself as the centre of the universe, the world does not change. In the museum, God may be dead, but the worship of man as the centre of the universe, as the benevolent, omniscient cultivator of Earth, continues, a parody of sorts that claims to report civilisation’s culmination but truly contains our demise. This demise is not simply an abstract moral point, but one that reflects as well as has profound impact on how we interact with each other and our environment. Scholars and curators Subhadra Das and Miranda Lowe are unequivocal about the role museums played in their article “Nature Read in Black and White: Decolonial Approaches to Interpreting Natural History Collections”: “Museums were integral to entrenching these scientifically racist ideas, functioning as repositories for the objects and specimens collected on scientific expeditions carried out around the globe, and, simultaneously, legitimising this collecting in the context of scientific thought.”25 In their chapter, they provide a summary of scientific racism from Carl Linnaeus to the Nazis in WWII. They include one of the better-known examples of overt colonial scientific racism on display at museums: the statue of Theodore Roosevelt on a horse flanked by a Native American and an enslaved African. The statue is among one of the rallying points of the #DecolonizeThisPlace movement, which is calling on the Human Origins and Cultural Halls in the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) to recognise its racist exhibitions. Scholars and curators have drawn attention to the way the statue depicts white superiority above others races. Scholar Nicholas Mirzoeff further shows how the racist science of craniology and physiognomy were used to make the heads of the figures of the statue, so that the statue visually represents white superiority over other races through scientific racism.26 An intriguing story that illustrates the layers of collusion between present day and historical cultural institutions to maintain white superiority based on ownership that is God-like is what happened when artist Carrie Mae Weems produced her important photographic series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried.27 The series appropriates the daguerreotypes of enslaved people and other “found” images. In an interview with poet and scholar Eunsong Kim, Weems tells a story of when Harvard University threatened to sue her because she didn’t have the right to use their images, their slave daguerreotypes (my emphasis). Weems decided that perhaps having Harvard sue her would be “useful”: “maybe I don’t have a legal case, but maybe I have a moral case that could be made that might be really useful to carry out in public.” She responded to the institution that a court 135

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case might be “a good thing” and that this was a conversation that “we” should have in court, because the discussion “would be instructive for any number of reasons.” Harvard then attempted to negotiate, suggesting it would suffice to have just received a portion of the sales. Weems refused. Incredibly, Harvard ended the correspondence by purchasing the series. What was later uncovered was that behind Harvard’s purchase was another institution: the Getty Museum had “commissioned” the series. The Getty also has daguerreotypes of captive people (comprising the few of such objects that exist in the world).28 Kim, whose work interrogates how art theft, legality and property produces whiteness in her work, decided to investigate further. She went to the Getty as a researcher, “learning about provenance, contacting archivists and experts on the ideas of ‘ownership’ and emailing Harvard (to be rerouted to their PR team).” She learned that Louis Agassiz, a Swiss zoologist and marine biologist, and the founder of many US natural history museums and the biological classification system, immigrated to Boston in 1846, and commissioned the daguerreotype portraits to be taken in 1850. Previously, Agassiz had lived in Paris where he was mentored by Alexander von Humboldt and later received his financial benevolence. When Agassiz immigrated to the US, he showed immediate public support for the abolition movement but became close friends with phrenologists such as Samuel Morton. He wrote hundreds of letters to his mother, describing encounters with black men and women in Boston, about his desires for “them to stay far away.” As he was writing these letters, he formulated scientific theories of the separate spheres of racial classification. In opposition to Darwinian theories of the time, Agassiz wished to use the newly invented medium of photography as “his proof for the separation of races, and to promote the necessity of scientific racial classification.”29 Museums consecrate(d) science. They consecrate(d) race science. They consecrate(d) the ideal of the white man. It is the white man that became God, superior above all else. It is the white man who raised science to the level of religion but said, this is provable in a way nothing else is. And then said it is objective in a way nothing else is: My Word, objective and neutral, where all else is superstition and magical thinking. It is the white man that became master of the earthly realm, his mastery justified through data collecting, through theft, through amassing objects, specimens and academic papers. The collusion between Harvard and the Getty Museum, between ownership and copyright, between past institutional founders and current ones, shows the layered interconnectedness of whiteness. They (claimed to) kill God, and then they replaced Him. It is whiteness that they protect, revere and defend. Only by emphasising what is incommunicable (the depths of our difference), untranslatable (who we are), intractable (colonialism) and impossible (to decolonise), can we begin to grapple with where we are at. There is no data grab that can save us. There is no knowledge base or tool kit. There is only what we cannot know and acknowledging that lack of knowledge. This is more than humility; it is an admission that we are not Gods.

Notes 1 Kim, Eunsong, The Gospel of Regicide (Blacksburg: Noemi Press, 2017), p. 20. 2 Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis,” Marxist Perspectives 1, no. 4 (1978): 28–51. 3 Carol Duncan, “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (New York: Smithsonian Institute, 1991).

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Museums Are Temples of Whiteness 4 See J. Pedro Lorente, Cathedrals of Urban Modernity: Creation of the First Museums of ­Contemporary Art (New York: Routledge, 1998). 5 Duncan, 91. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings, edited by Nathan ­Huggins (Library of America, 1987), 923–938. Originally published in The Independent, August 10, 1910, and revised for the collection Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920). 10 Ibid., 923. 11 Reiland Rabaka, “The Souls of White Folk: W.E.B. DuBois’s Critique of White Supremacy and the Contributions to Critical White Studies,” Ethnic Studies Review 29 2, no. 1–19 (2006): 5. 12 Sara Ahmed, “The Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 149–168. 13 Ibid., 150. 14 Galanin withdrew this piece from the 2019 Whitney Biennial. He writes: “the Whitney, like so many other museums, continues to draw on toxic philanthropy that wields power over our communities while creating a self-congratulatory climate of comfort for the existence of economic disparity, cultural suppression, erased histories, and white guilt. This is all part of the noise that White Noise, American Prayer Rug (2018) … refers to: distraction from economic, cultural, and environmental realities constantly being generated to justify and protect the status quo.” See ­Nicholas Galanin, “Standing Together: Whitney Biennial Artist Nicholas Galanin on His Decision in July to Pull Work from the Show,” ARTnews (September 11, 2019) accessed January 6, 2023. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/nicholas-galanin-whitney-biennial-removal-13215/ 15 The phrase “museums are not neutral” was popularised by cultural organizer LaTanya Autry and educator Mike Murawski. 16 Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, “Race and Affect at the Museum: The Museum as a Theatre of Pain,” in Heritage, Affect and Emotion, edited by Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson (New York: Routledge, 2016). 17 Duncan, 92. 18 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40, 6. 19 Ibid. 20 I see such histographies as part of what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called “provincializing Europe” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000), which is attending to the particularities and localities to undermine the notion of universal values that Europe often insists upon. 21 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 263. 22 Ibid., 264. 23 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 24 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 25. 25 Subhadra Das and Miranda Lowe, ‘Nature Read in Black and White: Decolonial Approaches to Interpreting Natural History Collections,’ Journal of Natural Science Collections 6 (2018): 5. 26 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Why It’s Right That the Theodore Roosevelt Statue Comes Down,” June 20, 2020, accessed March 1, 2022, https://hyperallergic.com/573782/why-its-right-that-the-theodoreroosevelt-statue-comes-down/ 27 Part of the series can be found on the artist’s website, http://carriemaeweems.net/galleries/fromhere.html#header 28 Kim Eunsong, “Found, Found, Found: Lived, Lived, Lived,” Scapegoat Journal 9 (2016): 53–54. 29 Ibid.

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Selected Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. ‘The Phenomenology of Whiteness,’ Feminist Theory 8(2) (2007): 149–168. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (New Jersey: Princeton ­University Press, 2009). da Silva, D. F. Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Das, S. and Lowe, M. ‘Nature Read in Black and White: Decolonial Approaches to Interpreting Natural History Collections,’ Journal of Natural Science Collections 6 (2018): 4–14. Du Bois, W. E. B. From W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1987), 923–938. Originally published in The Independent, August 10, 1910, and revised for the collection Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920). Duncan, C. ‘Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,’ in Exhibiting Cultures ed. Ivan Karp (­Editor), Steven D. Lavine (New York: Smithsonian Institute, 1991). Duncan, C. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995). Duncan, C. and Wallach, A. ‘The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis,’ Marxist Perspectives 1(4) (1978): 28–51. Galanin, Nicholas. White Noise, American Prayer Rug. 2017 (New York: Peter Blum Gallery). Galanin, Nicholas. ‘Standing Together: Whitney Biennial Artist Nicholas Galanin on His Decision in July to Pull Work from the Show,’ Art News, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/nicholasgalanin-whitney-biennial-removal-13215/ Pub: 11/09/19 [accessed 21/12/2021].Kim, Eunsong. ‘Found, Found, Found: Lived, Lived, Lived,’ Scapegoat Journal 9 (2016): 53–60. Kim, Eunsong. The Gospel of Regicide (Blacksburg: Noemi Press, 2017). Lorente, J. Pedro. Cathedrals of Urban Modernity: Creation of the First Museums of Contemporary Art (New York: Routledge, 1998). Mirzoeff, Nicholas. ‘Why It’s Right That the Theodore Roosevelt Statue Comes Down,’ 20th June 2020, https://hyperallergic.com/573782/why-its-right-that-the-theodore-roosevelt-statue-comesdown/ [accessed 03/01/2022]. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 181–82. Rabaka, Reiland. ‘The Souls of White Folk: W.E.B. DuBois’s Critique of White Supremacy and the Contributions to Critical White Studies,’ Ethnic Studies Review 29. 2 (2006): 1–19. Tolia-Kelly, Divya P. ‘Race and Affect at the Museum: The Museum as a Theatre of Pain,’ in Heritage, Affect and Emotion, edited by Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson (New York: Routledge, 2016). Tuck, Eve and Yang, K. Wayne. ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,’ Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1(1) (2012): 1–40. Wynter, Sylvia. ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,’ CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3) (Fall 2003): 257–337.

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9 STEPPING OUT OF THE SHADOW OF IMPERIAL MONOCHRONY A Place-Centric Approach to Decolonizing Japanese Art History Akiko Walley Introduction In White Path Between Two Rivers, a monk crosses a narrow path to salvation over a river that appears as flames of rage to the left and roaring waves of desire to the right. On the opposite shore is located the Western Pure Land, where a buddha, flanked by his two attendants, welcomes the monk traveler. Encouraged by the Buddha standing at the eastern shore, emitting glorious golden light, two additional men (another monk and a layman who has just rid himself of his armor and weapons) rush toward the white path through the savagery of war and charging carnivores, hoping to embark on their own journey (Figures 9.1 and 9.2). The road to decolonizing Japanese art history is just as precarious and treacherous as traveling the narrow white path to salvation. One must navigate through two vices of ­Japan’s modernity that still cast a long shadow over the postwar discourse on Japanese art history: the impulse toward erasing the nation’s history as a colonialist empire, and the ethno-nationalism that continues to exclude any cultural traditions except that of the “­Japanese” (wajin 和人) from the mainstream art history of the present geopolitical ­Japanese archipelago. In Japan, art history emerged as an academic discipline in the first half of the twentieth century.1 Today, English textbooks on Japanese art history closely mirror the periodization and discourse in their Japanese counterparts, ensuring that the curriculum in EuroAmerican institutions always reflects how Japan defines the discipline.2 At first glance, the pedagogical practices surrounding Japanese art history in Euro-American institutions may appear to decenter the Western epistemology of the art history discipline: scholars within the Euro-American institutions are listening to the voice of Japanese people as they assert their agency over the nation’s cultural heritage and history.3 The matter, however, is not so simple because the present system of Japanese art history itself was a product of a double colonial legacy: (a) by being established by Japan as an emerging colonial empire amidst the

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Figures 9.1 and 9.2 The white path between two rivers (Niga byakudō 二河白道図). Kamakura period, circa 1200s. Hanging scroll; ink, color, gold, silver, and cut gold on silk. Overall: 215.1  × 67.7  cm (84 11/16 × 26 5/8 in.); Overall with knobs: 215.1  × 73.3  cm (84 11/16 × 28 7/8 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Norweb Foundation 1955.44.

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Figures 9.1 and 9.2  (Continued).

nation’s rapid modernization = Westernization in the Meiji period (1868–1912) and (b) by having its narrative constructed through translating and adapting the very Euro-American rhetoric that the discipline is now working to rectify.4 The Meiji government understood that having Japan’s own national art history was paramount to prove the nation’s modernity and civility to Euro-American empires and to propel its own expansionist agenda, making it all the more important for us to first decolonize Japanese art history before it can contribute to any present decolonization effort of the Euro-American discipline and pedagogical system.5 Focusing on the issue of periodization, this chapter discusses the imperial legacy that still underlines today’s standard narrative of Japanese art history. As a case study, I will introduce the overlap between the Kofun 古墳 (“Tumulus”; circa third century to 538, 552, or 710CE) and Asuka 飛鳥 (538 or 552 to 710CE) periods, which betrays the disciplinary rift between archaeology and art history, as well as the remnants of the “imperial view of history” (kōkoku shikan 皇国史観) established under the Meiji empire, the myth of which still underlies the popular imagination of Japanese homogeneity and unbroken evolution of its art and history. In doing so, this chapter also contributes to the broader problematization of the relationship between art history and power. It concludes by proposing a reconceptualization of Japan in survey textbooks on Japanese art history from an ­ethnocentric definition to a more actively geopolitical one. 141

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Defining Japanese art history as the study of objects of visual and material culture produced within the present geopolitical borders of the Japanese archipelago, first of all, reflects the reality of how students most typically arrive to a survey textbook or a course on Japanese art history, that is through their awareness of what is presently known as Japan in its geopolitical configuration. A key mission of a survey, thus, is to complicate the students’ preconception, which one could effectively do by counterintuitively doubling down on the geography. Until the latter half of the nineteenth century, the northernmost island, southern islands, and the remainder of the Japanese archipelago maintained ethnically independent existence. Recalibrating our attention to the Japanese archipelago as sites of artistic production works as an effective antidote to Japan’s colonial legacy. The central argument for Japan’s national unity since the modern era has always been the blood, not land, that manifested as the rhetoric of ethno-homogeneity of the Japanese people and the mythology of the unbroken imperial lineage. Even today, the idea of a homogeneous and unbroke ethnic identity remains the undisputed core of the monochronic linear narrative of Japanese art history.6 A focus on the Japanese archipelago allows one to move away from the singular linear progression of history into histories, a more nuanced interweaving of multiple temporal threads.

Meiji Imperial Cultural Policies and the Invention of Japanese Art History Although there are some differences in interpretation of the exact beginning and end dates, all textbooks on Japanese art history employ the standard periodization that was formalized in the postwar period, following the general categories familiar to Western art history: 1 prehistoric (senshi 先史; c. 11,000–400 BCE) Jōmon period 2 protohistoric (genji 原史; c. 400 BCE–seventh or eighth century CE)7 Yayoi (c. 400 BCE–300 CE) Kofun (c. 300–552/710) 3 historic (rekishi 歴史; c. sixth century–present) a ancient or classical (kodai 古代; c. sixth century–1185 or 1192) Asuka (538/552–710)8 Nara (710–794) Heian (794–1185/1192) b medieval (chūsei 中世; 1185 or 1192–1600 or 1615) Kamakura and Nanbokuchō (1185/1192–1392) Muromachi (1392–1573) Azuchi/Momoyama (1573–1600/1615) c early modern (kinsei 近世; 1600 or 1615–1868) Edo period d modern/contemporary (kingendai 近現代; 1868–present)9 This standard periodization has its foundation in what is presently considered Japan’s ­modern era of the Meiji period. In 1853, Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794–1858) and his fleet of “black ships” (kurofune 黒船) arrived at the Uraga Port near the Tokugawa ­shogun’s seat of power of Edo (present-day Tokyo). The shogunate signed the initial Treaty 142

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of Friendship and Amenity with the United States in 1854, followed in 1858 by the signing of Treaty of Amenity and Commerce with the United States, England, France, Netherlands, and Russia. The “gunboat diplomacy” triggered a chain of events that eventually led to the fall of the Tokugawa regime and the establishment of the new Meiji imperial government in 1868. The treaties spared the Japanese archipelago from colonization in exchange for a disproportionate control over Japan’s trade by the Western (seiyō 西洋) imperial powers. The newly established Meiji government spent the remainder of the nineteenth into the early twentieth century overhauling Japan’s military, governance and commerce, and social and cultural norms, according to the Western templates, in hope of rectifying the unequal trade and diplomatic relationship, all the while turning the same modernization drive into a justification to further its own colonial ambitions. The fledgling Empire of Japan (Dai Nippon Teikoku 大日 本帝国) initiated its expansionist campaign in 1868 by claiming the northernmost island of Hokkaidō 北海道 as its territory and acculturating the indigenous population (the Ainu). In 1872, Japan annexed the Ryūkyū 琉球 Kingdom that occupied the southernmost islands, setting the blueprint for the geopolitical boundaries of Japan as we know it today. Toward the end of the nineteenth century—as Japan gained confidence in its modern military—the Meiji government began aggressively seeking expansion to “foreign lands” (gaichi 外地), leading to the colonization of Taiwan (1895) and Korea (1910), and later the establishment of Manchu (1932–1945) and the invasion of Southeast Asia and some Pacific Islands (1940s). In addition to a rapid militarization, the Meiji government considered critical to redefine (or invent) a cultural identity suitable for Japan as a modern empire to garner the respect of the Western nations. In 1872, the first Imperial Museum (Teikoku Hakubutsukan 帝国博 物館; present-day Tokyo National Museum) opened its doors in Ueno Park, Tokyo. Japan’s first school for Western art (Technical Fine Arts School; Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō 工部美術学 校) was established in 1876, followed by the opening of Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō 東京美術学校) in 1887, which initially specialized in Japanese-style painting, sculpture, and craft. The invention of “art” (bijutsu 美術) and Japanese “art history” (bijutsushi 美術史) according to the Western model was at the heart of the Meiji government’s effort toward national “civilization and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika 文明開化). Study of objects of visual and material culture (especially painting, calligraphy, and accoutrements related to tea drinking) existed prior to the Meiji period. What marked a clear break from the earlier practices was the concept of arranging objects of art into a linear narrative of steady evolution demarcated by newly defined periodization. Okakura Kakuzō 岡倉覚三 (aka Tenshin 天心; 1863–1913) established the skeleton of Japanese art history through the lectures he delivered for three years at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts beginning in 1890.10 The first historical survey of Japanese art, Histoire de l’Art du Japón, was compiled first in French in 1900 to be exhibited at the Japan Pavilion in the Exposition Universelle in Paris (hereinafter Histoire). The Japanese translation of Histoire was published the year after in 1901, underscoring how Japanese art history emerged first and foremost as a West-facing communication. The new national art history was tasked to not only perform the cultural sophistication of Japan of the Meiji modernity through its very existence, but also to demonstrate that Japan has, in fact, been cultured and civilized since the antiquities, and that the “citizens of the Empire of Japan” (Nihon Teikoku-min 日本帝国民) were inherently attuned to beauty.11 The three ideological backbones that scaffolded the Japanese art historical narrative entailed: (a) the Western hierarchy of artistic categories that prioritized painting 143

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and sculpture; (b) temporal thread of imperial lineage; and (c) emphasis on Buddhism as the philosophical foundation that united the cultural sphere of the “Orient” (tōyō 東洋) vis-à-vis the West. The triple foundation allowed Okakura’s lectures, Histoire, and subsequent Japanese art surveys of the prewar period to present this national art form as unique but equal in sophistication to that of the West, provide evidence that the empire’s history is superior to that of China or the West due to the nation’s “unbroken” imperial lineage, and argue for the supremacy of Japan as the only civilized nation in Asia because it alone retained Buddhist art and culture as the “treasure trove of the Orient” (tōyō no hōko 東洋 の宝庫).12 Generally, what is called the Asuka period today corresponds to what Okakura and Histoire designated as the Suiko 推古 and Tenji 天智 periods, taking after the names of the imperial sovereigns whose reigns were understood to encapsulate the characteristics of the period’s artistic production.13 Defined by the introduction and initial blossoming of Buddhism and its art, these periods marked the “beginning of Japanese art history” in Okakura’s lectures, Histoire, and all surveys until the postwar period.14 In these earliest iterations of Japanese art history, what we presently designate as “prehistoric” was not yet acknowledged as part of art. Meiji-period surveys did include a chapter on “Pre-Suiko” that corresponds to today’s Kofun period. Rather than treating it as a part of Japanese art history, however, Pre-Suiko was used as an opportunity to establish the idea of an unbroken imperial lineage extending to mythology and to define the art of Japan as works created by ethnic “Yamato” Japanese (Yamato minzoku 大和 or 日本民族) who “descended from High Heavens” (Amatsu-kuni 天つ国 or Takamagahara 高天原), excluding the indigenous population, emigrants from China or the Korean Peninsula, and colonial subjects.15 For instance, Okakura’s lecture boasted that Yamato people already possessed the civilized and aesthetic minds even at this pre-art state: [the imperial] subjects held an artistic mentality [bijutsu shisō 美術思想] from the remote antiquity, maintained extremely high quality of life, decorating their clothes with jewels. They had long abandoned the barbaric practices as we see in ancient ­Europe of readily tattooing one’s body. Their thoughts were elegant. They were already establishing a capital in Kashihara region [present-day Nara prefecture], weaving their clothes using looms, and producing comma-shaped beads using jade.16 Histoire also claimed: The eastward transmission of Buddhism during Sovereign Suiko’s reign was what presented the elegant and sophisticated art of the Asian continent to our Japanese people, who were by nature intelligent and filled with artistic spirit, and instigated the great development of Japanese art.17 The idea that Japanese people already and always possessed a natural inclination to art served to justify the inclusion of surviving works from the Suiko period—which even Histoire had to admit were produced largely by the hands of the emigrant specialists from the Korean peninsula and China—within the narrative of Japanese art history. The impression of Pre-Suiko at this time was established largely on found objects, which scholars characterized, as Okakura put it: “not worth discussing systematically as bijutsu.”18 144

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Postwar Japanese Art History and the Shadow of the Meiji Imperial Legacy In August 1945, the Japanese Empire lost the Pacific War that had lasted for 15 years. The defeat marked the end of the imperial regime since the Meiji Restoration and the dawn of a new era of democracy based on the United States’ model. On January 1, 1946, Emperor Hirohito (1901–1989) gave his first ever New Year’s rescript on radio broadcast. Popularly known as the “Declaration of Humanity” (ningen sengen 人間宣言), this rescript proclaimed that the bond between the emperor and the “nation’s people” (kokumin 国民; not “imperial subject” or shinmin 臣民) has always been based on “trust and affection” (shinrai to keiai 信頼と敬愛) and not on the “fantastic concept” (kakū no kannen 架空の観念) about the emperor as a “living divinity” (akitsu mikami 現御神) or the “Japanese people’s destiny to rule the world due to their ethnic superiority” (Nihon kokumin o motte ta no minzoku ni yūetsuseru minzoku ni shite, hiite sekai o shihaisubeki unmei o yūsu 日本国民 ヲ以テ他ノ民族ニ優越セル民族ニシテ、延テ世界ヲ支配スベキ運命ヲ有ス).19 The new Japanese art history of the postwar era reflected this revised notion of the emperor and Japan’s kokumin through two key changes. One, the periodization—formerly designated by names of the imperial sovereigns or aristocratic and warrior families appointed by the emperors as the de facto political leaders—was changed to the names of the location of political centers. Two, art history incorporated the pre- and proto-historic periods, which were the domains of archaeology. The two changes represented the postwar effort to purge any trace of imperial view of history from Japanese art history.20 The incorporation of archaeology is noteworthy because unlike art history—which the imperial government actively promoted—the government consistently censored archaeology in the Meiji into wartime era. Archaeology as an academic discipline was established in Japan following the Western precedent in the 1890s, which coincided with the launching of the new mandatory education system.21 To indoctrinate children into becoming the loyal subjects of the imperial patriarch, Meiji to prewar textbooks repeated the myth surrounding the divine origin of the “unbroken” imperial lineage as historical fact.22 The Meiji imperial government perceived archaeology as a threat to the nation because excavating prehistoric sites carried the danger of debunking the officially endorsed (mytho-)history concerning the beginning of Japan’s civilization. Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War liberated archaeology from the tight grip of the imperial government.23 Published in 1977, Nihon bijutsushi 日本美術史 (History of Japanese Art), edited by Yamane Yūzō, first incorporated the Jōmon to Kofun periods into Japanese art history.24 Embracing archaeology allowed Japanese art historical discourse to superscribe the imperial mythology of Pre-Suiko with a new history of “Japanese people” (Nihonjin 日本人). Due to an increase in excavation, Jōmon, Yayoi, and Kofun periods no longer relied on random found objects. Scholars now contextualized the stylistic changes within the movement of people and objects across Northeast Asia. Instead of asserting the mythological origin of the first emperor, the Kofun period now discussed “chieftains” (shuchō 首長) and state formations that eventually led to the centralization of power around the “Great Kings” (ōkimi 大王) who began to call themselves “emperors” (tenō or sumeramikoto 天 皇), following the Chinese precedent. For the Asuka period that followed, introduction of Buddhism still remains central to the early development of Japanese art but not as a proof of Japan’s supremacy over other Asian nations. Japan’s defeat and the open concession of the emperor’s “humanity” finally allowed academic disciplines to decouple Japan’s past from mythology and objectively position the 145

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nation’s culture and history within Asia and the globe. In his recent survey (published in Japanese in 2005; translated into English in 2018), Tsuji Nobuo reaffirms this postwar scholarly attitude: Patriotism has no place in my view of Japanese art … The arts are neither isolated nor immutable, but like currents of art that know no national boundaries, move through transmission and cultural exchange, and along the way acquire local qualities, as artists infuse them with their own forms of expression.25 On the surface, it appears as though the postwar revision successfully decolonized ­Japanese art history at least in terms of Japan’s own colonialist past. This, unfortunately, is not so. The issue lies in the fact that the postwar revision was implemented without much consideration to what the Japanese art history of the new era of peace and democracy could/should be. Returning to our case study, the embrace of archaeology created a temporal discord, or rather an awkward double take, in the transition from the Kofun period, which had its roots in archaeology, to the Asuka period that was carried forward from the prewar art history. In the present narrative, the Kofun period traces the Yamato state formation through monumental tombs and funerary objects of the third century CE onward. The start of the Asuka period, on the other hand, continues to be defined by the transmission of Buddhism either in 538 or 552, just as it was in the prewar Suiko period. Named after the region in the Nara prefecture where the earliest palaces of the future emperors resided, the Asuka period views the arrival of Buddhism—as religion, art, and technology—foundational to the eventual centralization of power around the Yamato sovereignty. Postwar surveys clearly distinguish the chief characteristics of the Kofun and Asuka periods, but the span of time they cover overlaps by about 50–200 years.26 This is due to the simple fact that the construction of funerary mounds continued long after Japan’s embrace of Buddhism. Despite the confusing parallel timeline, the two periods work together to present a single narrative of the emerging centralized imperial rule. In other words, although the postwar Japanese art history no longer subscribes to the imperial mythology, the through line continues to be the (unbroken) imperial lineage, now doubly affirmed by archaeological and art historical narratives. In his article tracing the evolution of periodization in Japanese archaeology, Uchida Yoshiaki explains that in the postwar period, the “important task” of establishing the “origin history” (sōseishi 創世史) for the new kokumin of Japan befell on archaeology. The discipline responded to this call by implementing an image of Japanese people as the “unchanged historical agent that occupied the same geographic region” (kawaranu chiiki ni kurasu kawaranu ninaite 変わらぬ地域に暮らす変わらぬ担い手).27 The postwar effort to purge any mention of imperial mythology put Japanese art history into an epistemological crisis by gutting the unity and coherence necessary for a national cultural discourse. Embracing archaeology and its “origin history” filled this hole, allowing Japanese art history to salvage its narrative of unbroken linear progression by adapting the claim that Japan’s “nation’s people” have already and always resided within the general geopolitical boundaries of the Japanese archipelago. The Kofun to Asuka transition betrays that the imperial view of history is still at the heart of Japan’s national origin and the development of Japanese art. Despite the changes to the standard periodization names, Japanese art history today still traces the activities of emperors and the aristocratic and warrior subjects symbolically 146

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bestowed rulership by the emperors. Just as the prewar rhetoric of Japanese people’s innate “artistic mentality,” the concept of “unchanged historical agent” ensured the uniqueness of Japanese art and insulated it from the waves of transmission of non-Japanese objects and people by establishing a clear dichotomy between ethnic-Yamato/Japanese “we” and nonethnically Japanese “they.”

Conclusion: Toward Place-Centric Japanese Art History In short, beneath the façade of new period names, the framework of the Meiji imperial Japanese art history survived into the postwar era along with the basic assumption of unbroken presence of Japanese people on the Japanese archipelago as a unified historical agent, producing uniquely Japanese art. Tsuji Nobuo’s introduction (quoted above), for instance, asserts that his survey centers on the three concepts that he believes constitute the “core of Japanese art.”28 The present periodization names make clear that the concern of Japanese art history is the urban loci of wajin. Survey textbooks typically include no mention of the Ainu or the Ryūkyū Kingdom, rendering the cultural heritages and voices of the historically non-wajin residents on the Japanese archipelago invisible and silent. Although most surveys introduce major waves of people and objects throughout Japanese art history, the contribution of the emigrant population in shaping the art of the Japanese archipelago recedes behind the celebration of Japanese uniqueness as we approach the end of the ancient period. Furthermore, the emphasis on urban foci also means that any developments in the “peripheries” (chihō 地方) that do not conform to the culture of the center are rendered irrelevant to the linear progression of Japanese art. In the introduction to Time in the History of Art, co-editors Dan Karlholm and Keith Moxey introduce the recent scholarship in English language that questions the “authority of chronology.”29 The two conceptual shifts that scholars have thus far proposed to destabilize or diversify the teleology-driven monochrony are anachrony, which acknowledges that an artwork can belong to multiple times, and heterochrony, addressing the multiplicity of time itself.30 In the case of decolonizing Japanese art history, the embrace of heterochronicity that “time does not move at the same speed in different places” provides an alternate model which counteracts the modern colonial construct of Japanese people and the misconception that the present geopolitical Japan was ever the domain solely of the ethnic wajin.31 The key is to redefine “Japan” in Japanese art history from the ethno-centricity to something more purely geopolitical. That is, rather than Japanese art history, the art histories of Japan. Semantically, “art histories of Japan” may appear to parallel Gerardo Mosquera’s reconceptualization of “Latin American Art” as “Art from Latin America.”32 Here it is critical to reemphasize that Japan was an aggressive imperial colonizer. Even if the modern national construct had emerged in response to the Euro-American colonial pressures, Japan was never colonized. Unlike “Latin American” or “Africa,” which have long been problematized as the externally imposed colonial inventions, a concept of ethno-nationhood existed among the wajin imperial court and its subjects for centuries prior to the arrival of ­Matthew Perry in 1853. Instead, what the modern Japanese colonialists invented was the idea that the art of the ethnically wajin was the only cultural production existed on the Japanese archipelago. To be clear, the present geopolitical iteration of Japan exists only after 1972, when Oki­ nawa (former domain of the Ryūkyū Kingdom) rejoined the nation following the postwar 147

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US occupation. For this reason, art histories of Japan as it is proposed here is no less ahistorical as the Meiji-born “Japanese art history.” This shift, however, at least liberates the production of objects of visual and material culture on the Japanese archipelago from the monochronic and monolithic construct of Japanese people. The artistic endeavors of the wajin political foci will be contextualized within the heterochronic art histories of the Ryūkyū Kingdom, the Ainu, emigrant communities, as well as the regional variations among those who may have politically and linguistically identified as members of the Yamato domain but nevertheless resided in their own intersections of cultural space and time. The geopolitical focus insulates the new art historical discourse from becoming an invitation for Japan as present political entity to conveniently forget its colonial past or to abandon its responsibility to grapple with the trauma it caused through physical invasion. In the meantime, the embrace of heterochrony ensures all ethnic or regional communities, including wajin, the choice to whether or not assert its own heritage by appropriating the framework of “history” as any kind of movement of time. For the postwar period, the place-centric approach that moves to rectify the imperialist origin of Japanese art history can also shine light on the activities by artists identifying themselves with the marginalized communities displaced during Japan’s colonial era—for instance, the “residents of Japan” (Zainichi 在日) of the Korean descent, many of whom are first or subsequent generations of people from the Korean Peninsula who were forcibly relocated to the Japanese archipelago following the 1910 annexation—without essentializing any trans- or multi-national histories and experiences into a single ethnic identity.33 By constantly shifting the historical agent of artistic production, the art histories of Japan will decenter the imperial lineage as just one regional temporal variation within the distinct but intertwining temporal threads of artistic activities on the Japanese archipelago, finally containing the imperial view of history within its own nineteenth-century colonial space and time.

Notes 1 In Japan, art history was established as an academic discipline between the 1910s and 1950s. For more on the history of discipline in Japan, see Ōta Tomoki, Shakai to tsunagaru bijutsushigaku (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2015), 11–50. 2 For state-of-the-field overviews, see John M. Rosenfield, “Japanese Art Studies in America since 1945,” in The Postwar Developments of Japanese Studies in the United States, ed. Helen Hardacre (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 161–194; Mimi Yiengpruksawan, “Japanese Art History 2001: The State and Stakes of Research,” The Art Bulletin 83, no. 1 (2001): 105–122. For a discussion of the nineteenth-century American concept of Japanese art, see Nakashima, “Defining ‘Japanese Art’ in America,” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 17 (2006): 245–262. 3 On the early impact of Japan’s postwar art legislation to Euro-American perception of Japanese art, see Yoshiaki Shimizu, “Japan in American Museums: But Which Japan?” The Art Bulletin 83, no. 1 (2001): 123–134. 4 Extensive research on the birth of Japanese art history exists both in Japanese and English. For English translation of the pioneering work by Satō Dōshin, see Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty, trans. Hiroshi Nara (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2011). See also, part 2 (“Japanese Art of the Period in Its Cultural Contexts”) of Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868–2000, ed. J. Thomas Rimer, trans. Toshiko ­McCallum (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012; 193–280), which includes essays on creation of aesthetic vocabulary (Michael F. Marra), Okakura Tenshin (John Clark, o ­ riginally published in 2005), and nascent art criticism (Mikiko Hirayama); Mimi Yiengpruksawan, “­Japanese Art H ­ istory 2001,” 105–122; Kinoshita Nagahiro, “Okakura Kakuzō as a Historian of Art,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 24 (2012): 26–38.

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Decolonizing Japanese Art History 5 In his overview of Japanese art studies in the United States in the postwar period, John R ­ osenfield rejects the notion that Japanese art in the West has been “distorted by Eurocentric or colonialist attitudes” (as in the sense of Edward Said’s Orientalism) because the early Euro-­American ­historians’ interest in Japanese art was rooted in their acknowledgement of values within it that lacked in the West, even if they imposed “certain Western values” (attitudes, vocabulary, and doctrines), the legacy of which “endures to the present day.” Rosenfield, “Japanese Art Studies,” 169–170. 6 Scholars in Japanese academia have now began exploring ways to decolonize Japanese art history. Between August and December 2022, Odawara Nodoka and Yamamoto Hiroki organized a series of ten lectures that feature the contributors to their edited volume, Kono kuni (Kindai Nihon) no geijutsu: “Nihon bijutshishi” o datsu teikoku shugi-ka suru [the arts of this nation’s (modern Japan): decolonizing “Japanese art history”], forthcoming in 2023. 7 Based on Penelope Mason, History of Japanese Art, revised by Donald Dinwiddie (2nd edition; Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2005), 10. In today’s textbooks, “protohistoric” and “historic” are not as commonly used as “prehistoric.” 8 Some textbooks also include “Hakuhō” 白鳳 period between Asuka and Nara. The interpretation of this period varies among scholars. Furuta Ryō, “Jidai kubun kara mita Nihon bijutsushi,” in Kyōyō no Nihon bijutsushi, ed. Furuta Ryō (Kyoto: Mineruva Shobō, 2019), 3–5. 9 The six English textbooks used for comparison are: Mason, History of Japanese Art; Tsuneko S. Sadao and Stephanie Wada, Discovering the Arts of Japan: A Historical Overview (Tokyo: Kōdansha International, 2003); Stephen Addis with a chapter on gardens by Audrey Yoshiko Seo, How to Look at Japanese Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996); Stephen Addis, Gerald Groemer, and J. Thomas Rimer, eds., Traditional Japanese Art and Culture: An Illustrated Sourcebook (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006); Joan Stanley-Baker, Japanese Art (3rd edition; New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014); Tsuji Nobuo, History of Art in Japan, trans. Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 10 Although Okakura was instrumental in the initial conceptualization of Japanese art history, he was not involved in the actual drafting of Histoire. Unless otherwise noted, my discussion of the history of Japanese art history is based on Satō, Modern Japanese Art, especially Chapter 4 (“The Formation of the Academic Discipline of Art History and Its Development,” 153–182. 11 Teikoku Hakubutsukan, ed., Nihon Teikoku bijutsu ryakushi kō (Tokyo: Nōmushō, 1901), 1 (preface). The first Chapter on Japanese terrain includes Taiwan, which was annexed in 1895. Ibid., 1 (main text). 12 Teikoku Hakubutsukan, ed., Nihon Teikoku, 3 (preface). The preface to Histoire boasts, “­One cannot hope the citizens of China and India to carry out the task [of compiling the history of ­Oriental art]. It was only possible by the citizens of our Empire of Japan, who are the treasure troves of the Orient.” Ibid., 4 (preface). 13 Sovereign Suiko (554–628) reigned from 592 to her death in 628. Tenji (626–671/672) reigned from 668 to his death. 14 Okakura states, “Japanese art history begins in the Suiko period” (Suiko irai o motte bijutsushi to nashitari 推古以来をもって美術史となしたり). 15 Okakura, Nihon bijutshshi, 19–20. Teikoku Hakubutsukan, ed., Nihon Teikoku, 25–26. 16 Okakura, Nihon bijutsushi, 20. 17 Teikoku Hakubutsukan, ed., Nihon Teikoku, 55. 18 “Bijutsu to shite keitō datete noburu hodo no mono aru nashi” 美術として系統立てて述ぶべき ほどのものあるなし. Okakura, Nihon bijutsushi, 16. 19 There are many studies of Emperor Hirohito and the postwar re-envisioning of him as the “­human emperor.” For an accessible English study that focuses on this process, see Herbert P. Bix, “Inventing the ‘Symbol Monarchy’ in Japan, 1945–52,” The Journal of Japanese Studies 21, no. 2 (1995): 319–363. 20 Satō, Modern Japanese Art, 165–166. 21 In 1893, Tsuboi Shōgorō (1863–1913), who returned from his studies in England and France the year prior, established Japan’s first archaeological study within his anthropology seminar at the Tokyo Imperial University (Tokyo Teikoku Daigaku 東京帝国大学; present-day Tokyo University).

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Akiko Walley 22 According to the Record of Ancient Matters (Kojiki 古事記; compiled 712 CE) and Chronicle of Japan (Nihon shoki 日本書紀; 720), the imperial lineage descended from Amaterasu アマテラス, the Sun Goddess. 23 Kondō Yoshirō, “Sengo Nihon kōkogaku no hansei to kadai,” in Nihon kōkogaku kenkyū ­josetsu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1985), 444–450. 24 Yamane, ed., Nihon bijutsushi (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1977). 25 Tsuji, History of Art in Japan, xxv. 26 Most textbooks set the end date of the Asuka period to either (circa) 645 or 710. The end date of the Kofun period on the other hand is set circa 600, or again 710. For common range of Kofun-­Asuka periodization, see, for instance, Stanley-Baker, Japanese Art, 20; Mason, History of ­Japanese Art, 10; Tsuji Nobuo, History of Art in Japan, 31. 27 Uchida Hiroaki, “Nihon kōkogaku no jidai kubun,” Kōkogaku kenkyū 231 (2011): 34. 28 Tsuji, History of Art in Japan, xxv. 29 Karlholm and Moxey, Time in the History of Art: Temporality, Chronology and Anachronity (London: Routledge, 2018), 2. 30 Ibid., 3. 31 Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 1. 32 Mosquera, “From Latin American Art to Art from Latin America,” in Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino? eds. Mari Carmen Famiez, Thomas Ybarra-Frausto, and Héctor Olea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 1123–1132. Translation of Mosquera’s original article in 2003. 33 For an accessible introduction to the history of Zainichi, see John Lie, “Zainichi: The Korean Diaspora in Japan,” Education About Asia 14, no. 2 (2009): 16–21. Lie clarifies that, unlike the categories of Korean American or Korean Canadian, the rhetoric of homogeneity in Japan and ­Korea that derived from nationalistic mindset precluded the in-between (Korean Japanese) identity, making naturalization nonviable for majority of Zainichi individuals. Lie, 18.

Selected Bibliography Furuta Ryō, ed. Kyōyō no Nihon bijutsushi. Kyoto: Mineruva Shobō, 2019. Karlholm, Dan, and Keith Moxey. Time in the History of Art: Temporality, Chronology and Anachronity. London: Routledge, 2018. Kondō Yoshirō. Nihon kōkogaku kenkyū josetsu. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1985. Moxey, Keith. Visual Time: The Image in History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Odawara Nodoka and Yamamoto Hiroki eds. Kono kuni (Kindai Nihon) no geijutsu: “Nihon ­bijutshishi” o datsu teikoku shugi-ka suru [the Arts of This Nation’s (modern Japan): Decolonizing “Japanese art history”]. Tokyo: Getsuyōsha, 2023 (forthcoming). Ōta Tomoki. Shakai to tsunagaru bijutsushigaku [Socially engaged study of art history]. Tokyo: ­Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2015. Rimer, J. Thomas, trans. Toshiko McCallum. Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868–2000. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012, 193–280. Rosenfield, John M. “Japanese Art Studies in America since 1945.” In The Postwar ­Developments of Japanese Studies in the United States, edited by Helen Hardacre, 161–194. L ­ eiden: Brill, 1998. Satō, Dōshin, trans. Hiroshi Nara. Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011. Shimizu, Yoshiaki. “Japan in American Museums: But Which Japan?” The Art Bulletin 83, no. 1 (2001): 123–134. Stanley-Baker, Joan. Japanese Art. 3rd edition. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014. Teikoku Hakubutsukan, ed. Nihon Teikoku bijutsu ryakushi kō. Tokyo: Nōmushō, 1901. Yamane Yūzō, ed. Nihon bijutsushi. Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1977. Yiengpruksawan, Mimi. “Japanese Art History 2001: The State and Stakes of Research.” The Art Bulletin 83, no. 1 (2001): 105–122.

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10 ON FAILURE AND THE NATION-STATE A Decolonial Reading of Alfredo Jaar’s A Logo for America Florencia San Martín In 1987, Chilean-born, New York-based artist Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956) projected his ­animation A Logo for America in Times Square, New York City (see Figure 10.1). Part of the “Messages to the Public” program—a series of computer-generated artworks with social and political content broadcast from a 20-by 40-foot Spectacolor lightboard from 1982 to 1990—Jaar’s 35-second animation was shown every six minutes from April 19 to May 2 on the lightbulb screen. The work opens with the outline of a map of the United States, followed by a statement written across the map that reads: “This Is Not America.” The font is then pixelated while the map turns into the US flag with a second negation that reads: “This Is Not America’s Flag.” The word “America” then blinks on the screen and transforms into the continental landmass of the Western Hemisphere, which is then duplicated as the word “America” disappears. The animation concludes with the continental Americas rendered in a single graphic at the center of the screen, while the word “America” multiplies on both sides. Through a conceptual strategy overlapping images and texts, Jaar’s work challenged the appropriation of the nomenclature “America” by the United States, a linguistic tension that served as a metaphor for US colonial designs over Latin America. A signature work of Jaar’s art in the last decade A Logo for America has been shown in multiple cities, from Buenos Aires to Bogota, Porto Alegre, and Mexico City, and from London to Miami, Des Moines, Bentonville, and more. Starting with its 2014 reprisal in Times Square as part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition, Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, curated by Pablo León de la Barra, Jaar’s animation (see Figure 10.2) has since frequently been projected in public spaces and screened in monitors at art venues. Critics, curators, and art historians have noted the anti-imperialist relevance of the work’s afterlife while also reading it in relation to its mobility of meaning according to its sites and dates of display. As curator Katerina Stathopoulou put it: A Logo for America has become Jaar’s best known and most reproduced work to date, in part because the meaning of “America” is still contested today … In 2014 when [A Logo for America] was presented in New York City, twenty-seven years after its debut, the topic of Latin American immigration was central to the conversation, 151

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Figure 10.1  Alfredo Jaar, A Logo for America, 1987.  Public intervention, Times Square, New York. Courtesy of the artist.

as the Obama Administration was felt by many to be disappointing on the issue. In Mexico City in 2016, the work took on additional meaning, as a result of Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric and initiative to build a border wall to keep migrants out. For those who disagree with Trump’s policies, the work can be interpreted as signifying, “This is not the America that represents them.” With each iteration, the understanding of A Logo for America may grow and differ, yet its original intent is never lost since US dominance over the American continents [sic] is still in place.”1

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Figure 10.2  Alfredo Jaar, A Logo for America, 2014.  Public intervention, Times Square, New York. Courtesy of the artist.

Other recent literature around the work has equally emphasized the importance of the animation’s afterlife regarding the ways in which political contingency has propelled mobility of meaning regarding the word “America.” It is key to note, however, that mobility of meaning in these readings is typically associated to the US as America, either from the left or the right. Following the examples from the above quotation might lead one to reflect on the campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” (MAGA). Created during Donald Trump’s successful On Failure and the Nation-State: A 2016 presidential campaign, this slogan rapidly became a popular culture phenomenon in the US and beyond. Both supporters and opponents, however, naturalized the use of the word “America” as the US. In this contemporary context, we can deduce that this is why Jaar’s main negation “This is not America,” has been applauded by those against “Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric.”2 Implying that the US (a country) is America (a region), this approach is precisely what Jaar negates. Something similar happens if we turn the enunciation’s locus of “America” from MAGA to the other side of the political spectrum. Consider, for instance, the medley of the iconic protest song by Woody Guthrie “This Land Is Your Land” (1940) followed by “America the Beautiful,” performed by Jennifer Lopez during Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration in 2021. As viral protests on social media indicated, the messaging portrays “America” as a nation-state built by settler colonialism. The lyrics erase First Nations peoples by denying their ancestral lands and subsuming them to “America,” while also honoring “American” expansionism as an empire that spans “from sea to shining sea.”3 That the messenger was a singer whose family roots are from the US colony of Puerto Rico added insult to the injury. How would Jaar’s work be perceived in the context of an inauguration following a rightwing insurrection? Whether Trump’s “America” or Biden’s “America,” the piece’s message becomes inverted away from the hemispheric towards the nation-state. “I completely lost control over it,” Jaar said of his animation’s afterlife.4

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Political contingency regarding the word “America,” alongside the rather contradictory idea that the work’s essential meaning is simple has taken over the discourse around A Logo for America, especially in the fields of [US] American and “global” contemporary art. Yet, after spending several years thinking and writing about this and others works by Jaar for a book-length project based on my doctoral dissertation, I have come to the conclusion that what is missing in from these readings is an appreciation of the broader, continuous critique formulated by Jaar on the role of language vis-à-vis the coloniality of power under which we live and operate. This complex matrix of power has been created and controlled by the West since the conquest of Abya Yala and the creation of the Americas.5 In other words, what is missing is a decolonial understanding of the animation and its afterlife. In this chapter, I reframe Jaar’s A Logo for America to elaborate on two important concepts in decolonial theory. The first is the decolonial notion of failure that resides at the heart of his animation and that operates as a form of resistance and radical hope in the unfinished struggle against colonialism. The second is the work’s central critique of the modern nation-state as a site of coloniality. In so doing, this chapter also presents a critical rather than affirmative response to the instrumentalization of Jaar’s work as a symbolic gesture of inclusion and diversity in recent curatorial practices and museum acquisitions, unearthing the shallow multiculturalism that through neoliberal practices of insertion conceals the ongoing wounds of coloniality and their presence in the politics of the modern nation-state.

On Failure In his 1999 book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Black science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany describes Times Square before its gentrification in the early 1990s as a “zone of contact” in which encounters between peoples beyond their class and race took place, creating circumstances that allowed new modes of solidarity.6 These forms of interaction, according to Delany, were drastically destroyed in the 1990s with the “cleaning” and “zero tolerance” policies designed by the then New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.7 Aiming to attract massive tourism and consumption in the age of neoliberal global expansionism by preventing, as Delany suggests, tourists’ fear to what he calls “zones of contact,” Times Square was redesigned through a radical urban development plan that replaced small red sites, such as pornographic theaters, for postmodern skyscrapers, chain stores and restaurants, and the addition of hundreds of corporate billboards and signs, all maintained by policing and surveillance. It was in this “clean,” “contactless” plaza, as Delany would put it, that Alfredo Jaar first reenacted A Logo for America in 2014, 27 years after its original presentation. The occasion, as mentioned before, was the exhibition Under the Same Sun, which at the museum building featured a documentary video of its original 1987 version, which was shown together with works by 40 artists and collaboratives from Latin America. A Logo for America was projected in Times Square simultaneously on 15 signs and 45 screens, all of different sizes, through a remastered version of high-definition LED technology. Mirroring Times Square’s neoliberal advertising spectacle and consumerist abundance, the work was now surrounded by dozens of popular characters from Disney, Sesame Street, and Marvel and by signs and billboards from corporations including the word “America,” such as Bank of America, American Apparel, American Eagle, and the ABC morning news program “Good Morning America.” Using a similar form of visual communication as the language of advertising, for three minutes every night during August, Jaar’s animation stated visually and 154

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blatantly on 60 screens that the US is not America. And yet, the surrounding signs in the corporate landscape of Times Square that had blocked Delany’s zones of contact stated, unequivocally, that it is, and that said America represents the corporate success and expansionism of the US nation-state. In this context, as one critic noted, the work showed “how easily and casually [the problem formulated by Jaar] has come to pass.”8 Importantly, since its 2014 reenactment, A Logo for America has been reproduced through different technologies and forms of display. The 2014 remastered version, for instance, was used again in 2015 during Under the Same Sun’s itineration at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, and then again in 2016, with the third and last iteration of the show at the South London Gallery in London. While in Mexico City the work was broadcast from one screen at the top of a vertical concrete structure located in a parking lot adjacent to the National Auditorium on the avenue Paseo de la Reforma, in London it was projected simultaneously as three adjacent videos, at the bottom left of the large 783.5m2 Piccadilly Light screen in the heart of the West End. Not only do these projections differ from one and other and from the work’s inaugural reenactment in Times Square in terms of repetition, singularity, multiplicity, size, and relation to iconic touristic sites, it is also significant that since 2014, Jaar’s animation has not always used its high-definition LED technology. In 2018, for instance, the work was shown from a billboard in a highway in Iowa’s capital of Des Moines through its original 1987 technology of lightbulbs. This technology was used again in 2019, when the animation was broadcasted from a single screen at the Plaza de la República in Buenos Aires in Argentina, facing Buenos Aires’ iconic obelisk. Considering these examples (and there are more) of the work’s afterlife and its variations in regards to technology, form, and relation to site, one may wonder if there is a pattern designed by the artist to match, for instance, the remastered high-definition version with iconic sites surrounded by LED and neon billboards illuminating massive gatherings and circulation of traffic, humans, and promotional consumerism in major cities, as in the case of Times Square. Yet, this is not the case; a parking lot in Mexico City is not exactly an iconic site, and in Buenos Aires’ iconic Plaza de la República, currently known for its LED and neon technology, the animation was shown using the lightbulbs version, that is, a technology from the past. With these variations, the artist is not only contextualizing the work in the present through current technology, he is also insisting on the importance of presenting the work as a work from the past whose pulsating meaning continues inhabiting the ongoing present. In this sense, the strategy (or pattern) is to repeat and vary, that is, to insist and differ, in order to present the work’s afterlife as it expands and formally (and not conceptually) changes as a project which is one and ongoing, unfinished, just as decoloniality itself. As Nelson Maldonado-Torres writes, “decoloniality [is] an unfinished project [that] is still unfolding now.”9 The work’s meaning, past and present, is to make visible from the realm of language and the political and ethical tactic of conceptualism as developed from Cold War Latin America, that decolonial struggle against human degradation and thus of ethical reparation is essentially incomplete, unresolved.10 Accordingly, the work can be understood as a failed project that, as such, exposes the continuity of colonial rule in every aspect of human relations, including language. As Jaar once said: The work was a reaction to the fact that the word America has been misused by the U.S. and that we (Latin Americans) are erased from the map. This has become a global problem. Europeans also talk about America, or l’Amérique, to refer only to the U.S. It was a subversive gesture, but of course, it did not work at all.11 155

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Jaar’s animation and the words he uses to describe it reminds us, as Judith Butler writes, that “For representation to convey the human, then representation must not only fail, but must show its failure.”12 With this in mind, one may deduce that if there is one equation that is not conflicted in Jaar’s animation it is that semantics can’t be extricated from coloniality, or the conceptual continuity of a colonial world in our present modernity.13 Language is represented by Jaar as an extension of, in his words, “that reality that is out there.”14 And “that reality that is out there” is not erased or resolved, as one critic stated in 2016 London writing that the work “resemble[d] a pair of eyeglasses, as if to confirm that a misunderstanding is being couched and clarified.”15 It is neither inverted in the binary model of modernity through a cartographic correction, as was maintained in the early 1990s by scholars and curators who from the lens of postcolonialism connected Jaar’s animation to a genealogy of works by Latin American artists using cartography to denounce imperialism in North-South relations, as famously shown in the 1943 drawing Inverted Map of South America by the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García, where the artist “inverted South America (facing north to south, and vice-versa) to emphasize its autonomy from European aesthetics.”16 In effect, Jaar’s animation is not inverting the map; he is not replacing the European idea of the North by the European idea of the South and thus reproducing, that is, affirming the dualistic dialectic of modernity by keeping, although upside-down, the hegemonic geopolitics of knowledge. As Joaquín Barriendos writes, The politics of cartographic inversion in Latin American art has become institutionalized, and has come to be burdensome and static, without the ability to go beyond the metageography of modernity: it’s an Other modernity, and it’s inverted, but it’s a modernity, with all that this entails.17 In contrast, Jaar’s work represents “that reality that is out there” as such, approaching to it by outlining the appropriation of the word “America” by the US to refer exclusively to itself as, in the words of Sacvan Bercovitch, an “over-arching synthesis, e pluribus unum.”18 Looking critically at US’ self-assigned role in intervening in democracies and claiming sovereignty over territories in the South, Jaar, in the midst of the Times Square crowds while A Logo for America was being broadcast in 1987 told a National Public Radio reporter: “[the work] just reflects a certain reality that is out there, so when that reality changes, maybe language is going to change.”19 Jaar’s aim in A Logo for America is both to note that reality and hopefully to change it, fostering in the viewer the decolonial idea that things could be otherwise and that liberation is yet to come. Until the US stops projecting itself as the single continental “America” representation on this problem must continue, just as decolonial struggles for liberation must endure. As Maldonado Torres writes, “projects of decolonization and liberation refer to forms of resistance and transformation that seek to undo dehumanizing practices and the suffering that ensures from them.”20 Furthermore, in continuing, representation as and of failure in Jaar’s animation works as a decolonial project that contests the lineal temporality of modernity and as such recalls that the reality shown by Jaar in 1987 didn’t change in 2014, when the work was first reenacted in neoliberal Times Square and formally camouflaged itself with dozens of corporate signs including the word “America.” Neither did it change in 2016 with the launch of Trump’s MAGA campaign nor it did in 2021, when the Democratic Party took over the presidency in the US. And it certainly didn’t start in 1987,

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when Jaar first broadcast the work. As will be explained below, it started in the nineteenth century with US imperialist expansionism and its relation to longer history of colonial dialectics commenced in 1492, “The year in which the conquest and colonization of the Americas began and the moment to which we can trace the emergence of a firm imperial Europe conceiving itself as the center of the whole world and the telos of civilization.”21 Yet, A Logo for America’s insistence as failure is what activates awareness of coloniality and decolonial hope for change, reminding us that representation won’t stop since decolonial hope won’t stop. Thus, the animation’s loop—the repetition of the narrative over and over again, making impossible a conclusive, final statement. And thus the animation’s own repetition over time and across sites. Because it fails it repeats, because it fails it insists, because it fails it resists, once and again. “Working with failures (cognitive and political) with their sensitive information is part of the process of reshaping thought, again and again, into a state of rebellion,” writes sociologist Véronica Gago.22 Failure thus propels resistance, and resistance to hegemony (of language, semantics, cartography, etc.) is enunciated from below. Joining a genealogy of subaltern modes and discourses of resistance in which political dissent and decolonial hope together are articulated from beneath, Jaar’s animation inhabits the same place of ruins, which are covered by modernity’s buildings, and also of wounds, which are covered by scars.23 Ruins and wounds are not visible in modernity’s public policies; they are not visible in modernity’s cities, plazas, urban design, and iconic monuments and signs. But they still exist from below, battling and continue propelling many to fight back on multiple fronts, one of them being the coloniality of language embedded in the word America. In turn, failure as resistance reminds us that memory matters and thus that time is not linear; pasts and futures are contained in the present. Accordingly, failure as resistance means that the pasts, in plural, have not stopped informing the politics and subjectivities of resistance of both presents and futures, exposing the pulsing and open wounds, or as the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano would put it, the “open veins” of decolonial thinking. Jaar’s work in this sense shows that the coloniality that caused these wounds, that is, the unhealed or better said, the ignored wounds of the before are still used by our neoliberal world system to design the now, instead of the nows, and that is why, in the face of a dominant singular world in which time is lineal and progressive, the nomenclature “America” is still being used as the linguistic designation of the US as an imperial nation-state.

On the Nation-State Writing in the context of massive protests against celebrations around the Quincentenary and the so-called encounter of two worlds in the early 1990s, sociologists Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein contend that America, as “discovered,” came to represent for Europe the “New World,” with tropes such as newness, innovation, and progress justifying Europe’s “expansion of its geographical size [and] development of variegated methods of labor control” through Indigenous denigration and slave trafficking from the African continent.24 They argue that this was only possible through the drastic destruction of every aspect in life, as if the past had never existed, allowing all “economic and political institutions [to be] construct[ed] virtually ex nihilo.”25 This is why “we can speak about Americanity as a concept” they write, continuing: “There could not have been a capitalist world-economy without the Americas.”26 Americanity, therefore, regards the role of the Americas in the

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establishment of the pillars of the capitalist world economy more than 500 years ago, and the continuity of this world system today at both the global and hemispheric levels. Regarding the latter Quijano and Wallerstein write: “[E]ven when formal colonial status would end, coloniality would not [since] hierarchy reproduced itself over time [with] states [such as the US] shift[ing] ranks.”27 In the hemisphere this means that since the nineteenth century, Americanity has equaled the prevalence of Manifest Destiny in successive programs of imperial strategies which, in turn, Latin America has resisted although failing, just Jaar’s A Logo for America. As Greg Grandin put it, For over a century—beginning with the Monroe doctrine—Latin Americans resisted, often violently, both the United States’ self-assigned mission to reform humanity … and the militarism that such mission inevitably generated. In doing so, they forced the United States, often against the worst impulses of its leaders, to develop more pragmatic and flexible imperial strategies, strategies that proved indispensable in its postwar rise to global superpower.28 Jaar’s animation does just that: from the realm of language, it shows the US as an imperial power costumed as nation-state, with said costume unearthing its very empirical reality as a nation whose Enlightenment’s value of liberty and equality have, in essence, reproduced the de-humanizing and denigratory dialectic of coloniality. In this sense, the animation illustrates the relation between words, the nation, and coloniality. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui writes: Words have a peculiar function in colonialism: they conceal rather than designate, a function made particularly evident in the republican phase, during which the state adopted egalitarian ideologies while at the same time erasing the citizenship rights of the majority of the population.29 This means that coloniality towards otherness occurs within and beyond national borders or, in images, within and beyond cartography. Americanity, internal colonialism, and the interlacing of resistance, hope, and the unfinished that Jaar’s exposes in A Logo for America through the word “America” are also shown, together, in a previous and little-known work by Jaar. Titled America, America (see Figure 10.3), the work is a series of five black-and-white Photostats made by Jaar in New York in 1982, the year he moved to the city from his native Chile escaping the tyrannic USbacked civic-military regime led by General Augusto Pinochet and the C ­ hilean economic elite (1973–1990). Mounting each Photostat on panels of 30×40 cm, on each of the five units, overlapped with the image of the White House façade shown at the center and slightly angled to the right, Jaar writes different sentences with the following words: “America,” “north,” “south,” “us,” “our,” “their,” “them,” “plus,” “minus,” and “equals.” In so doing, he creates linguistic equations such as “South America (us), plus North America (them), equals America (our),” and “America (our) minus America (their) equals South America (us),” concluding his series with a phrase reading “Our America is Our America.” In concluding the work with the phrase “Our America is our America,” Jaar evokes Cuban revolutionary and writer José Martí’s (1853–1895) 1891 manifesto, “Nuestra América” (Our America).

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Figure 10.3  Alfredo Jaar, America, America (detail), 1982.  Five photostat, 20″ × 26″ / 50.8  cm × 66 cm each. Courtesy of the artist.

Written in the years leading up to the Spanish-US War of 1898—that is, after the US had appropriated almost half of Mexico in 1848 becoming, in the words of Miguel Rojas Mix, “a continent that goes from the Atlantic to the Pacific,” Martí’s “Nuestra América” denounces the emergence of the US as a new hemispheric power.30 “What is ‘Ours’?” Martí asks, responding to that question in the very title of the essay: “America.” And that America, Martí continues, resists not only the tiger’s (an allegorical figure of the US) “violence … inherited from four centuries” and a “Greece which is not ours”—it also resists “nineteen centuries of monarchy in France.”31 This latter is significant, as by the time Martí wrote “Nuestra América,” French intellectuals and Francophile Latin American elites were celebrating a new imperial Latin American identity through the concept of latinidad.32 With the idea of latinidad embracing “an educated civil society in America that turned its face to France and its back to Spain and Portugal,” the new idea of “Latin America” provided colonial elites with the tools to depict the region as its own “prey,” at the time the US was rapidly expanding and dominating the region.33 The nomenclature “Latin America” was thus yet another colonial enterprise embodying the existence of external and internal forms of colonialism.34 As Walter Mignolo writes: The “idea” of Latin America is that sad one of the elites celebrating their dreams of becoming modern while they slide deeper and deeper into the logic of coloniality.35 Within this overlapping imperial project, in which the use of the nomenclature “Latin America” was at stake, Martí deliberately uses the word “America” without the qualifier

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“Latin.”36 He writes, “the history of America, of the Incas”; “[the America of] the black man [who] sings at night the music in his heart”; and “[o]ur mestizo America,” including in his idea of “mestizo,” Indigenous and Black peoples.37 Martí’s idea of Latin America as Ours, therefore, is a call for hemispheric hope and resistance against capitalist and imperialist powers, as well as a critique to latinidad as a colonial construct that reproduces not only Indigenous but also Black erasure.38 In the US nation-state context, these erasures were noted by Sylvia Wynter: “The exclusion of the Black and the Red … was correlated with a school curriculum whose system of knowledge represented the nation as being bonded by the shared biogenetic characteristic of ‘Whiteness.’”39 From this perspective, America as discovered and appropriated by the US means Whiteness, and to exists as the guard of capitalism and vice-versa it entails the empirical invisibility (although paradoxically by the very appropriation of Indigenous land as private property and the development of various forms of labor) of racial minorities living in the US as well as low-income peoples and the unhoused. These two ideas of America—the utopian, unified, and liberated Our America imagined by Martí on the one hand, and the US as a nation-state that excludes racial, ethnic, and economic minorities while aiming at the regional control through neoliberal expansionism, on the other hand—are represented by Jaar in his America, America. This can be explained both historically and conceptually. Regarding the former, Jaar created the work in a historical moment in which Martí’s manifesto had just become known in US intellectual circles through the work of the Cuban poet and intellectual Roberto Fernández Retamar.40 It was also the moment in which Jaar had just escaped the dictatorship in Chile and upon his arrival in New York realized, through a linguistic designation that “shocked” him, about the relation between America as Whiteness as described by Wynter.41 In effect, said realization has continued shocking him, as we can deduct from the ongoing repetition of a later work, A Logo for America, related to the same linguistic coloniality. Regarding the conceptual presence of these two ideas on America in Jaar’s America, America, it is important to note that while Martí’s “Our América” is literally quoted in Jaar’s work—he writes “Our America is our America” in capital letters—the artist reframes Martí’s discourse: while in Martí’s manifesto “Nuestra América” triumphs, in Jaar’s America, America it fails, once and again, showing over time the continuity of such failure by insisting on the presence of an imperial nation-state built upon settler colonialism and racial erasure. This is shown in the last photostat of the series, where the artist keeps the image of White House in the background formulating an equation in which text and image corresponds. In so doing, Jaar evokes Martí’s call for hemispheric liberation while he also acknowledges that said call has not yet been resolved. In other words, the artist expands Martí’s manifesto by highlighting the continuity of a decolonial project that is still unfolding, adding to Martí’s strategies to resist imperialism the very notion of decolonial failure in and beyond the nation-state. Acknowledging the link between empire and nation-state, in Jaar’s A Logo for America on the other hand, we can also add that the second negation in the animation, in which the US map and flag are overlapped, is rather impossible, since the empirical nation-empire, despite its nationalistic and enraged construction of militarized walls, actually erases borders for its neoliberal domination across the region. In so doing, it denies Latin America’s autonomy by imposing the neoliberal logic of “freedom” as rhetoric of “salvation” of its hemispheric “backyard.” As John Bolton, Trump’s national security advisor told a reporter after Trump’s recognition of Juan Guaidó, a politician of a rival party from the governing 160

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body, as Venezuela’s legitimate ruler, “The Monroe Doctrine is alive and well. It’s our hemisphere.”42 On this basis, the argument revolves not so much in that the US calls itself America, but in that America from that perspective takes another connotation which is important to acknowledge, and that Jaar’s animation does by not presenting a counter narrative, that is, a counter flag. Viewed in this way, the animation is not so much about alternative or corrected flags and maps but about the decolonial idea that America as “invented” instead of “discovered” has indeed have multiple meanings.43 America, as Miguel Rojas Mix would put it, “has one hundred names.”44 It has meant and will continue to mean hemispheric liberation, Our America, decolonial regional struggle, but also imperialism, Whiteness, exclusion, Americanity, and so on. Jaar’s work in this sense invites the viewer to think and look at the animation in multiple and often diverted perspectives at once, acknowledging the complexities of coloniality and the many forms, fronts, and perspectives of resistance that decolonial praxis and intellectual inquiry entail.

Notes 1 Katerina Stathopoulou, “The Timeless Relevance of Alfredo Jaar’s ‘A Logo for America’,” April 2, 2020, https://art21.org/read/the-timeless-relevance-of-alfredo-jaars-a-logo-for-america/ 2 Ibid. 3 The first lines of the lyrics sung by Lopez are from Guthrie: “This land is your land, this land is my land/From the California to the New York islands,” while the third verse is from “America, the Beautiful”: “America! America! God shed his grace on thee/And crown thy good with brotherhood / From sea to shining sea.” https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-24/ jennifer-lopez-inauguration-left-out-key-verses-america-truths/13081688 4 Jonathan Blitzer, “A Logo for America,” The New Yorker, August 27, 2014, accessed November 22, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/logo-america. 5 See Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 6 Ver Robert F. Reid-Pharr, “Foreword,” in ed. Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue 20th Anniversary Edition (New York: New York University Press, 2019), xii. 7 Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue 20th Anniversary Edition (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 96. 8 Jonathan Blitzer, “A Logo for America,” The New Yorker, August 27, 2015. 9 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post-Continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique—An Introduction,” Transmodernity: Journal of ­Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 2 (2011): 1–2. 10 For more on conceptualism, see Luis Camnitzer, Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s– 1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999). 11 Alfredo Jaar, Jaar SCL 2006 (Santiago: Galería Gabriela Mistral), 71. 12 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 144. 13 For more on the concept of coloniality see Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–580. 14 Alfredo Jaar in conversation with the author, April 8, 2019. 15 Blitzer, “A Logo for America,” The New Yorker, August 27, 2014. 16 Shifra M. Goldman, “How Latin American Artists in the US View Art, Politics and Ethnicity in a Supposedly Multicultural World,” in ed. Shifra M. Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 377. A recent study by Michele Greet shows that the first image commenting on the idea of Latin America from an “imaginative” cartography was made by the Ecuadorian artist Manuel Rendón Seminario in 1928. In a painting titled The Geography Map, Rendón Seminario locates South America, written in French, at the center of the image. Only half of Europe is visible,

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Florencia San Martín and North America is completely absent from Rendón Seminario’s cartographic representation of the world’s cartography. See Michele Greet, Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris Between the Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 103. 17 Joaquín Barriendos Rodríguez, “La Idea del Arte Latinoamericano. Estudios Globales del Arte, Geografías Subalternas, Regionalismos Críticos,” PhD diss. (Universitat de Barcelona, 2013), 78. 18 Sacvan Bercovitch, “America as Canon and Context: Literary History in a Time of Dissensus,” American Literature 28, no. 1 (March 1986): 104. 19 Messages to the Public Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. 20 Nelson Maldonado Torres, Against War Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), xiii. 21 Ibid., 3. 22 Véronica Gago, “Introduction,” in ed. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa: On Practices and Discourses of Decolonization (Cambridge; Medford, MA: Polity, 2020), xxvi. 23 See, for instance, Kency Cornejo, “Writing Art Histories From Below: A Decolonial GuanacaHood Perspective,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture Journal 1, no. 3 (2019): 72–77; and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Recognition from Below: The Meaning of the Cry and the Gift of the Self in the Struggle for Recognition,” in ed. Nelson Maldonado Torres, Against War Views from the Underside of Modernity, 122–159. 24 Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Americanity as a Concept; or, The Americas in the Modern World-System,” International Social Science Journal I, no. 134 (1992): 549–550. 25 Ibid., 549. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 552. 28 Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, And the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 15. 29 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa: On Practices and Discourses of Decolonization (Cambridge; Medford, MA: Polity 2020), 12. 30 Miguel Rojas Mix, Los Cien Nombres de América: Eso que Descubrió Colón (Barcelona: Lumen, 1991), 24–25. 31 José Martí, “Our America,” in ed. Mari Carmen Ramírez, Héctor Olea, and Tomás YbarraFrausto, Resisting Categories: Latin American And/Or Latino? (Houston: Museum Fine Arts Houston, International Center for the Arts of the Americas, 2012), 208–215. 32 For more on this subject, see Fabiola López-Durán, Eugenics in the Garden: Transatlantic Architecture and the Crafting of Modernity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018). 33 See Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 59. For more on the rejection of the Spanish Empire by the North European narration of modernity, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 34 For more on the existence of external and internal forms of colonialism see Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. 35 Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 57–58. 36 Ibid. 37 Martí, “Our America,” 211. 38 For more on the latter, see Tatiana Flores; “‘Latinidad Is Cancelled’: Confronting an Anti-Black Construct,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1, no. 3 (July 2021): 58–79. 39 Sylvia Wynter, Do Not Call Us Negroes: How ‘Multicultural’ Textbooks Perpetuate Racism (San Francisco, CA: Aspire Books, 1992), 9. 40 For more on Martí’s reception in U.S. academic circles, see José David Saldívar, The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1991), 5; and Jean Franco, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 118. 41 Goldman, “How Latin American Artists in the US View Art, Politics and Ethnicity in a Supposedly Multicultural World,” 377.

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Decolonial Reading of Alfredo Jaar’s A Logo for America 42 Quoted in José David Saldivar, The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1991), 3. 43 For more on America as invented see Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America, An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961). 44 Miguel Rojas Mix, Los Cien Nombres de América: Eso Que Descubrió Colón (Barcelona: Lumen, 1991). According to historian Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, “[Rojas Mix’s book, Los cien nombres de América, is] the best analysis … in any language … of the origins and challenges of the term Latin America [providing] a full anatomy of the term [and] a serious criticism of its imperial and racial connotations.” See Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 19.

Selected Bibliography Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004. Delany, Samuel R. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue 20th Anniversary Edition. Nueva York: New York University Press, 2019. Flores, Tatiana. ““Latinidad Is Cancelled”: Confronting an Anti-Black Construct.” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (1 July 2021) 3 (3): 58–79. Franco, Jean. An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Grandin, Greg. Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, And the Rise of the New Imperialism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. Against War Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. José, Martí, “Our America.” In Resisting Categories: Latin American And/Or Latino? ed. Mari Carmen Ramírez, Héctor Olea and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. Houston: Museum Fine Arts Houston, International Center for the Arts of the Americas, 2012, 208–215. Mignolo, Walter D. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Quijano, Anibal and Wallerstein, Immanuel. “Americanity as a Concept; or the Americas in the Modern World-System.” International Social Science Journal I (134) (1992): 549–556. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa: On Practices and Discourses of Decolonization. Cambridge; Medford, MA: Polity, 2020. Rojas Mix, Miguel. Los cien Nombres de América: Eso Que Descubrió Colón. Barcelona: Lumen, 1991. Saldívar, José David. The Dialectics of Our America Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Wynter, Sylvia. Do Not Call Us Negroes: How ‘Multicultural’ Textbooks Perpetuate Racism. San Francisco, CA: Aspire Books, 1992.

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11 LIGHT AS A FEATHER: THE ANTI-CAPITALIST RADIANCE OF DECOLONIAL ART HISTORY Wendy M. K. Shaw

Introduction What if the analytical framework dominating analysis of art were not history but poetry? We would categorize objects less in linear relations of similitude and more in the synchrony of the experiences surrounding them. We would imbibe the world less through material composition, time, and place, and suckle instead on the intimacy of recognition. The analysis of art through history emerged in concert with European modernity. Its elements include the biographies of individuals (Vasari), the representational functions of figuration (Sandrart), the disinterested universal spectator (Kant), teleological history (Hegel), stylistic lineages (Riegl), and the iconographic textualization of images (Panofsky). When disciplinary art history informs our interpretation of objects, we impose a paradigmatic worldview upon their potentially broader meanings. The questions inspired by this art historical perspective give us certain kinds of information: what, where, when, and why. But finding the answers to these questions, we might forget to ask something far more pertinent to a non-European, non-modern subject: how would a person apprehend the world, and art within it, through a worldview distinct from ours? This chapter explores one such worldview through a segment of an allegorical epic that popularized complex and controversial theological concepts in the Islamic world, The Language of the Birds by Farid al-Din Attar, written in the city of Nishapur (modern Iran) in 1177 CE. Widely disseminated and quoted in the Persianate literary sphere of hegemonic Islam spanning the Balkans to India and Central Asia, the epic relates the tale of a diverse group of birds led by the Hoopoe on a long journey to petition their king, the Simurgh. But who is this king? The Hoopoe describes their leader as such: The matter with the Simurgh – O miracle! – Began once to disclose itself in China. A feather fell down from her in the midst of China, Whereupon turmoil seized the whole country. Everybody procured himself an image of that feather And whosoever beheld the image started to act. DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-14 164

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This feather is, thus, in the picture gallery of China. “Seek knowledge, be it even from China!”1 If the image of her feather had not disclosed itself, This uproar would not be in the world. All these works of creation are there because of her/its radiance. All images stem from the image of her feather. But since her description has neither beginning nor end, It is not befitting to speak more about her.2 The image that represents the feather that represents the ineffable Simurgh proliferates in the galleries of the world because it fails in its representational mission. Through this encounter with the feather, as modern subjects (Muslim or not), we can unlearn some of the approaches to art normalized through the apparatus of history. We can pick up an old set of tools through which to encounter the world anew.

Who Is the Simurgh? The mythology of the Simurgh developed through several narratives in the early Islamic era. She first appears in Kalila and Dimna, a popular book of fables largely translated from the Hindu Panchatantra, in a story of birds bearing a complaint to the royal bird Garuda. Whereas the Arabic translator ibn al-Muqaffa (d. 760 CE) equates her with the eagle/phoenix, the Old Syriac translation by Bud uses the name Simurgh, possibly derived from the Sassanian Senmurv. Bud’s usage reappears in two Arabic-language stories of the tenth and eleventh centuries in which birds petition the King Simurgh: the anonymously authored Treatise on Birds; and the twenty-second epistle of the secret society of Platonic Islamic sages known as the Brethren of Purity.3 Contemporaneously, the Simurgh appears in the Persian-language epic Book of Kings (Shahnama) by Firdausi of Tus (940–1025 CE), a descendant of Sassanian aristocracy eager to preserve pre-Islamic history under Islamic hegemony. Far from the I­slamic connotations that the bird would later acquire, the Shahnama articulates ­Zoroastrian mythology in which she scoops up the abandoned infant prince Zal to feed her chicks, but ends up raising him instead. When he matures and departs, she offers him her feathers as amulets which later heal his wife Rudabeh’s cesarean section, as well as the dangerous wound of their son Rustam, hero of the epic. The Simurgh only came to be visually represented as the resplendent fowl familiar in manuscript painting in the fourteenth century. Even then, illustrations were rare, and it’s only with the European collection of manuscripts starting in the late nineteenth century and the subsequent circulation of images (first in exhibitions and catalogues, then through online digitalization) that “the Simurgh” acquired a visual iconicity independent of texts. The gap between these literary and visual identities represents an epistemic rupture marking the trace of art history. An early surviving illustration of the Simurgh in this form appears in an album-bound illustration of the Simurgh carrying White-haired Zal, borne (right to left, in the direction of Arabic script) to a nest with two fledglings (Figure 11.1). Similar avian forms had already appeared on tiles manufactured in Kashan (Iran) around 1300. The form resembles representations of the Chinese Feng-Huang – itself possibly adapted from the Sassanian Saena and/or composite dog-bird Senmurv, and the ­Byzantine Eagle.4 By the fifteenth century, many illustrated manuscripts of the Shahnama included similar depictions of the Simurgh on the one- or two-page frontispiece depicting the 165

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Figure 11.1  Attributed to an artist named Shams al-Din. “Zal and the Simurgh,” Folio from a Shahnama, probably made in Tabriz under the Jalayrid Dynasty, c. 1370, Topkapi ­Palace Museum Library, Hazine 2153, folio 23a Copyright, Presidium of the Republic of Turkey National Palaces Administration (Milli Saraylar İdaresi Başkanlığı).

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Qur’anic narrative of King Solomon converting Bilqis (Queen of Sheba) to Islam through a ruse (Q 27.20–44). He instructs the jinn who serve him to steal her throne. When she comes to retrieve it, she is impressed by his cunning construction of an illusionistic representation of running water in his crystal palace and converts to monotheism. These frontispieces, often depicting both rulers enthroned, suggest Orphic-Platonic associations with Solomon by depicting him surrounded by animals. Above him, the Simurgh soars and plunges. What is Solomon doing introducing an epic where he plays no role? Why does the unrelated Simurgh hover above him? And what might either of these visits have to do with, of all things, decolonial art history and capitalism? The key lies in Attar’s Language of the Birds, named after the Quranic chapter indicating God’s bestowal of understanding the “language of the birds” (Q 27:13) upon the newly crowned King Solomon. Attar links this Solomonic imagery of kingship with the Simurgh by expanding on two pre-existing texts: the journey described in the anonymous “Epistle of the Birds,” and the Greek phoenix-inspired descriptions by Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi (1154–1191 CE) in his treatise, The Simurgh’s Shrill Cry.5 Like Suhrawardi, Attar describes the Simurgh as lacking visual form. Illustrated manuscripts of the Language of the Birds never visually represent the Simurgh, but generally focus instead on human parables framed by the allegorical avian migration. Absent from both texts, the Simurgh soaring above Solomon unites the Qu’ran with the Shahnama through reference to Attar. In this rendition of the image, the association with Attar is strengthened by the inclusion of birds surrounding the Simurgh.6 This inference, otherwise absent from Firdausi’s text, reframes Sassanian mythology within an Islamic-Abrahamic cosmology (Figure 11.2). This visual image of the Simurgh proliferates in modern renditions of the Language of the Birds. Using the epic’s frame narrative while discarding its complex language, allusions, and embedded parables, several modern renditions secularize the tale while retaining a spiritual feel.7 In them, the Hoopoe, assistant to King Solomon, gathers the rest of the birds to undertake a difficult journey to petition their king, the Simurgh. Learning to divest themselves of the extra weight of their worldly concerns, some birds survive the arduous journey. Arriving at the mountaintop, they find a lake obscured by clouds. Disappointed, they lower their heads to drink. When the sun emerges they see their own reflections and recognize themselves as the Simurgh: Thirty birds, a pun on the words si (30) and murgh (birds). Surprise, they are their own king! In contrast to Attar’s poem, designed to teach imbue parables with mystical Islamic precepts, these modern articulations remove Islam from the story.8 In Attar’s rendition, the weary birds arrive at the mountaintop lake, drink and see their reflection, only to be denied an audience with the Simurgh. Chided for their prideful demand for an audience, they are compared with the repentant brothers of the prophet ­Joseph. When the birds finally relinquish their selfhood, their epiphany overlaps with their joyous annihilation: they die. The moral is not democracy, in which individuals band together to enable just power, but the erasure of selfhood in the quest for theophany – quite the opposite. In storytelling, of course, such transformations abound: the entire saga of the Simurgh as it flies from culture to culture, subsuming other mythic birds reborn in an infinitely shapeshifting form reflects the absence of stillness in a process where each retelling articulates the needs of a new context. On the one hand, such secularized, sanitized renditions offer an ­Islamic parable to a wider audience, recognizing a pillar of Iranian culture separate from

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Figure 11.2  Folio from a Shahnama (Book of kings) by Firdawsi (d. 1020); Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art S1986.196.1.

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the Iranian Islamic Socialist Republic after 1979. On the other hand, can one claim to represent the past while extracting religious meaning? Discovering, or even desiring, a secular alter-ego for an Islamic past does not offer the safe, neutral ground apparently promised by art history, the episteme of which is thoroughly impregnated with its Protestant European origins. To diffuse the religion in the Simurgh in the name of representing Islamic culture secularly produces Muslims as subaltern to Islam. Instead, by following the religious implications of the discourse of the Simurgh, this chapter attempts to discover a means of decolonizing our relationship with art and history capable of returning the gaze of the non-Islamic world. The Simurgh articulates a relationship with materiality, and thereby with capitalism, through a lens indivisible from a far less reductive understanding of Islam than that so often vilified in the contemporary era. By releasing the Simurgh to radiate an alternative paradigm of representation, materiality, and interpretation, I hope to challenge the colonial epistemic paradigm administered through the placement of “art” within “history.” Why might this matter? We are living through a civilizational cataclysm delineated by climate degradation and global authoritarianism masking neoliberal financial and political disenfranchisement. Recognition of the complex perceptual experiences of cultures not delineated by modernity inverts the use of art history as a teleological celebrant of pre-defined identities.9 By shifting the orientation of art historical practice from materialism to process, historicism to poetry, and travel to visitation, decolonial art history (an analytical practice potentially featuring neither art nor history) restructures the commodification of art as fetish towards art as praxis. The past becomes preserved less in the maintenance of forms than in the living discussion of meanings. Instead of attempting to perpetuate the past with the modernist premise of tradition’s insipient, inevitable demise, it allows for change as part of the premise of life. In this, the Simurgh is my guide.

The Colonialisms of Art History To what extent does a museum displaying an image of the Simurgh reflect its emic meanings? Museum consistently elide the problem of emic meaning, focusing on the formal transfer of the Chinese Phoenix to Persianate regions. For example, one of the most comprehensive descriptions available online accompanies a separated manuscript page from a Shahnama held in the “Arts of the Middle East: Islamic and Contemporary” collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).10 The relaxed, though brief, diplomatic relations between the Ming court in China and that of the Ibrahim Sultan’s father, Shahrukh (r. 1405–1447), opened the door to a renewed wave of chinoiserie production that shaped the depiction of the simurgh here. The form of the phoenix marks just one of the many Chinese motifs that filled the visual repertoire of Timurid and Turkman artists. … the phoenix in particular offered a fresh way of envisioning creatures that had inhabited the imaginations of Arab and Persian writers for centuries. The phoenix quickly become the preferred form for representing the Persian simurgh found in epics, like the Shahnama, and in mystic poetry, like ‘Attar’s Conference of the Birds.11 By emphasizing the transfer of forms and motifs as an outcome of diplomacy, the ­label provides little insight into how mythical birds articulated thought through parables. ­ 169

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The citation of “Arabs and Persian writers” limits the cultural range of appropriation in these stories, largely rooted in the Greek and Indian traditions. The label thus enforces the boundaries of “Islam” to ethno-linguistic groups, with no information about how “mystic poetry” would have produced Islamic meaning. Likewise, with no further information about the sultans, both renowned for their piety, the centrality of Islam in their courts disappears as a context for the consolidated artistic, poetic, and theological investments of the era. Rather than denoting complex discursive spheres, “Arab,” “Persian,” and “­Islam” each become reduced to categories of collective identity rather than meaningfully intertwined discursive spheres. Although the label suggests the cultural circulation of the bird through poetry, it ignores the intertextual relationships of this literature that refine the meaning of the Simurgh, as well as the absence of Simurgh illustrations from Attar’s texts. A label for a “Tile with Image of Phoenix” from Kashan in the Metropolitan Museum of Art “Department of Islamic Art” offers a different narrative, emphasizing conquest and trade rather than diplomacy – appropriate to the secularist implications of the geographic/ national designation of the Gallery of “Iran and Central Asia in the Mongol Age (13th–16th Centuries)” in which it is displayed. After the Mongol conquest of Persia in the thirteenth century, an extensive trade network opened from China to the Mediterranean, allowing goods to move more freely than in prior centuries. …Ilkhanid period artists readily adopted imagery from Chinese iconography, including lotus flowers, deer, dragons and other mythical creatures. This image of a soaring phoenix with crested head and elaborate trailing plumage exemplifies the adaptation of Chinese imagery by Persian artists.12 The description of a fourteenth-century manuscript, also at the Metropolitan, similarly emphasizes form: This Simurgh is not yet fully patterned on the Chinese phoenix of some 35 years earlier, which comes from a more sophisticated cultural center, but is far more graceful than the rooster/parrot type of Simurgh found elsewhere in the present manuscript.13 The reduction of mythological birds to visual forms ignores their narrative meanings. In asserting that the bird on a tile might be either a simurgh or a phoenix, the label suggests that the tile would be entirely decorative, mere “Chinoiserie” as suggested in the LACMA label.14 The central field is decorated in reserve against a lustred background with a simurgh, or phoenix, in flight surrounded by stylised clouds.15 Preference for the visual over the literary heritage of the figures voids the distinct mythologies of these birds, rendering them decorative and interchangeable. Yet they are not. The bird represented on Chinese wares was never a Phoenix, the fire-bird of Greco-Roman mythology, but a Feng-Huang, a mythology external to the Persian tradition. Applying the formal description of the Chinese Feng-Huang as a Greek “phoenix” to a Persian image, art historians pluck all these birds naked of meaning. By conflating images and mythologies, modern discourses disassociate them from the literary Simurgh flying between the Persian epic of kings, recast as Islamic through the frame of Solomonic kingship, and Attar’s popular Language of the Birds, where it articulates the mystic 170

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goal of dissolution in the Divine. Appearing in manuscripts from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, at times with no direct relation to textual narrative, the Simurgh is not simply decorative. Rather, it inserts this complex, intertextual legacy into every image that it visits, and its recognition probably shifted as discursive contexts changed. If, rather than conceiving of these images as illustrations, we take them as conversations, the Simurgh comes to represent a framework in which the viewer is invited to enter into conversation with a layered literary legacy such that when the Simurgh is framed by poetry with no relation to its known texts, meaning emerges comparatively in the mind of the viewer who knows multiple texts and contexts. In the Persian literary tradition, the Simurgh is far more significant than the Phoenix. Attar associates the Phoenix with the martyrdom of the mystic al-Hallaj, whose self-­ ­ effacement in the Divine is exemplary in Attar’s parable. Conversely, the Simurgh not only has a complex literary-religious genealogy but also became contextually recognizable by the end of the fourteenth century. The curatorial decision to avoid the problem by identifying the motif through tropes of trade and conquest elides the recognition of emic meaning. Far from prudent, it betrays an ideology preferring secular over religious meaning and locative identification over intertextual, trans-temporal association. In claiming to represent the alterity of another culture, it silences it. The museum object becomes the metonym for the subaltern subjectivity of the modern colony, long after political decolonization. Such historicist accuracy combined with the cultural poverty of these labels reflect a transformative mechanism of art history. In the tradition of Alois’ Riegl’s Stillfragen (1895), the signifying element – the fancy bird – functions independently from object or context. Scholarship traces its movement from a site of origins towards sites of dissemination, assuming meaning to disappear under conditions of migration, producing imported visuality as a formal system lacking signification. Even when contemporary art historians aim to correct for such formalism by contextualizing the transfer in political or economic history, they neglect to account for the ways in which meanings shift, accrue, and are transmitted through intermedial reuse including literature. Firdausi’s Avesta-inspired Simurgh of the tenth and eleventh centuries is not the same as the Simurgh depicted in a manuscript of his work illustrated after the bird was recast through the thought of Suhrawardi and popularized in the poetry of Attar. This Simurgh is not the same as the Chinese Feng-Huang that it visually resembles, and the modern “Si-murgh” (30 birds) emphasizes Attar’s pun while willfully ignoring the theophanic aspect of his Simurgh. Any desire for a consistent iconographic rendition of this bird ignores the living nature of the symbol that depends on a dynamic emic framework. An art history that imposes iconographic consistency imposes its desire for consistency on the past, thereby producing an epistemic colonialism. “Art” and “history” are both epistemically colonial. “Art” represents a broad vision of “the human” while undermining the intimate, subjective experience of individuals. “History” enhances these effects, placing works along a grid of time and place emphasizing origins as identity and recognizing movement across either axis as linear. “Art history” is a modern epistemic form that situates objects in a network of meanings interrelated in the globalized framework of the textbook or the museum, a taxonomic network in which each form can be localized and cross-referenced through tropes like influence, as in the case of the Simurgh. It represents the epistemic mastery of the modern subject through the ruse of representing objects voided of speech. Such epistemic colonialism is certainly not limited to Islamic art history. It is a universalizing modern imposition upon multiple historical and geographical legacies. Altarpieces in European churches become art only as objects of secular appreciation in museums rather 171

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than vehicles of witnessing.16 Nkisi Nkondi of the Kongo region become sculptures when stripped of blades and raffia to function as “African” sculpture, as though belonging to an entire, massive, and diverse continent.17 Pre-historic pictures become art only upon their nineteenth-century art-historical celebration as the origin of the activity of artmaking attributed solely to humans, in contradistinction to the Islamic tradition that recognizes birds, bees, and spiders as also participating in the creative ordering enabled by the Divine. Tiles with representations of mythical birds are manifestations of a larger art historical machine recasting the multitude of epistemes through which societies articulate object meaning under the singular, modern aegis of universal knowledge. A decolonial art history must not simply elucidate where things come from and how they move around, but the entangled, divergent emic meanings attributed to an object or practice. Instead, the musealized understanding of this iconic bird has overshadowed the multitude of intertwined meanings the Simurgh carries. For the museum, wherever it is located, is an institution that frames objects through the categorical structure of art history, transforming works into fetishes divested speech, enabling their circulation as commodities in the art market. To decolonize the production of meaning also means to replace the process of fetish commodification that drives the art historical engine.

Art as Commodity and Fetish Art history is not only colonial in a theoretical, epistemic sense. The fact that museums all over the world own objects from the Islamic-hegemonic regions was facilitated by physical colonialism. The case of the British Museum and British Library (formerly united) are the most obvious: colonial territories in India enabled the mass acquisitions of objects and manuscripts. But collections from Islamic-hegemonic regions depending largely on international art dealers (as at the Metropolitan, the Aga Khan, or the Doha Museums), the donated collections of private patrons who collected while traveling, the transformation of church reliquaries and textiles acquired during the Crusades into “Islamic art” (as at the Louvre and in Berlin), and collections enabled through archaeological discoveries (as in Berlin) all depend on imbalances of power that made the Global South permeable to European travelers and archaeologists and a financial structure that made the money of travelers go farther in the East than the West. Where the “East” of the nineteenth century debated whether learning from modern technologies necessitated adopting “Western” cultural, sartorial, and above all administrative practices, the “West” acquired objects from the “Orient” as trophies and inspiration for the design of modern industry (enabled through colonial labor and resources). The episteme of art history was one of many ways in which Euro-normative practices proliferated under universalist modernism, relegating emic modes of meaning-making to the ambiguous territory of “tradition.”18 For example, one of the earliest non-European regions to found museums, the Ottoman Empire used its Imperial Museum (established in 1872) to mimic European performances of territorial range and the inheritance of traditions – including the “Islamic,” collected from multiple regions of the empire. While designed to underscore sovereignty in resistance to European imperialism, its adoption of European epistemic practices reflected the success of cultural imperialism as a singular mode of modernity, and the role of “art” as a token of meaning within it.19 The concept of art as independent from worship emerged in Europe long before museums: between the Protestant destruction of images in the sixteenth century and the rise of a bourgeoisie interested in home decoration, non-religious art intended for non-­utilitarian 172

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private pleasure was well-established by the seventeenth century.20 Yet this art was closely tied to specific sites and lineages of ownership; it was not subject to a process of historicization external to its contexts, constructed through a narrative of artistic lineages and practices largely divorced from the realities of weddings and famines, wars and reconstruction, loss and interruption in which life occurs. The public institution that regulates the modern alchemy from object to art is the museum. By asserting the transcendence of chosen objects from the mortal life cycle of utility, damage, and obsolescence, the museum produces “art” not simply as an aesthetic object within the mercantile order of early capitalism, but as a fetish isolated from the market in which comparable objects circulate. The market value of collections rises when pieces resemble those in important museum collections, or when objects are shown as part of important exhibitions: the museum confers status, which becomes fungible through sales. The legacy of the word fetish articulates the displacement of European discomfort with the excess meaning and value imposed on the object onto the demeaned figure of “the pagan” posited as understanding the world through superstition rather than science. Derived from the Latin term factitius, meaning “manufactured,” “artificial,” St. Augustine used “genus facticiorum deorum” to refer to pagan idols. Giorgio Agamben points out that this association reflects Indo-European roots with religious connotations of making a sacrifice.21 The meaning of the term shifted as the alterity attributed to “pagan” practices identified by European elites shifted from local populations who had converted to Christianity towards distant populations who (in the eyes of missionaries) had yet to do so. Portuguese missionaries and traders applied the word feitiço, later transformed into fetisso, already in use to describe amulets used in the magical practices of common folk, to describe amulets from Africa encountered in the West.22 The transfer of the term from European to African practices became normalized in Willem Bosman’s Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (a collection of 14 letters published in Dutch in 1702 and in English in 1705), which misinterpreted local engagements with objects through the example of Europe.23 Misapprehended as “an enchanted thing,” the term circulated widely through Charles de Brosses’ 1760 attempt in Dissertation sur les dieux Fétiches to determine an origin for human religions. It persists in John Lubbock’s 1871 The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man, where he traces its progress from the absence of religion to “Negro” fetishism, to the roots of religion in totemism, and ultimately links it with witchcraft.24 Despite the widespread refutation of such arguments in relation to non-European cultures by the 1870s, the term “fetish” persisted to indicate the critique of false value through an implicit comparison between clear-thinking, clear-evaluating (Western) civilization. Through the fetish, both Marx’s critique of the commodity and Freud’s critique of sexuality presume an element of human primitivism persisting despite civilizational “progress.” Ironically, this process of overvaluing was intrinsic to their critique of their own societies, but they could only articulate it through projection onto a largely imaginary, supposedly primitive, geographically displaced, racially demeaned, and poorly understood Other. Arguing that the concept of the fetish originated In conjunction with the emergent articulation of the ideology of the commodity form that defined itself within and against the social values and religious ideologies of two radically different types of noncapitalist society, as they encountered each other in an ongoing cross-cultural situation 173

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between Europe and Africa, William Pietz suggests that the fetish articulates “the problematic of the social value of material objects as revealed in situations formed by the encounter of radically heterogenous social systems.”25 This mechanism enables art history to move objects between distinct social systems, unmooring the value built into their creation from the object and liberating it to float in the alternative system of value enabled by “art.” The museum transforms objects into fetishes of the modern, Eurocentric episteme through collection, organization, and preservation. Objects in the museum become imbricated as fetishes within a system of worship distinct from their origins. The object serves within a pattern of value: it becomes a commodity. Even if the museum object is precluded from circulation through its fetishization, it becomes paradigmatic for comparable objects in circulation. Without the museum providing the gold standard of worth, how would we know how to structure value outside of its sacral halls? Both G. W. F. Hegel’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s understandings of the place of art in modernity necessitate such renunciation of intrinsic meaning. For Hegel, art was destined to die when its material could no longer sustain spirit’s message and instead relied on analysis to infer meaning. For Nietzsche, science rang the death-knell of art, which lost the mythic ability to harness the contradictions of life into meaning.26 The definition of progress as movement from the state of creative products collaborating with their environments towards that in which they function as signs within deracinated systems of meaning, such as history, functions through an aporia – literally, a lack of resource, or an insolvable internal contradiction: art depends on alienation, and yet we look to art to reconstitute meaning. In contrast to the pre-Enlightenment European use of the word “idol” as a false object of worship in opposition to a true (Christian) one, the identification of an object as “fetish” serves as an accusation of investing it with intrinsic value rather than the relational meaning demanded through the situation of the object in the relational nexus of “art.” Even under the supposedly post-Christian regime of nineteenth-century secularization, objects had to be redeemed as “art” in order to avoid the supposed fallacy attributed to the fetish to “affect personal health and fortune, [following] the metonymic logic of amulets rather than the metaphoric logic of idols.”27 The requirement of art to represent universally and immaterially, thus transcending its substance, enables a double-consciousness of the object as simultaneously “priceless” and possessing immense, imminently fungible, value. In the Freudian sense of the fetish, the art object indicates a double attitude in which the subject simultaneously knows and refuses knowledge of a trauma hinged on pricelessness. It thereby becomes sacred as life and thus equivalent to the immaterial, and yet the fungibility of its sacrality is perpetually imminent in its potential sale, as in deaccession from a museum. This fall from grace, fall into materiality, mirrors our own fall into mere matter: death. The sacral aspect of the object, like the sacral aspect of the human, disappears in becoming a commodity. What for the human is, in Giorgio Agamben’s words, the state of “bare life” is, for the object, the state of commodification in which the object exists through its fungibility, with no intrinsic value. In fetishization, the art object stands in for our own imminent fall from bare life. In the case of the colonial object, the known/refused trauma becomes doubled not only in the potential for which it stands, but also through origins that are known/denied in the real and epistemic violence imposed in the acquisition of the object and its transformation into the system of art.28 In disseminating the ideology of “art,” art historians colonize forms into an ordering scheme that disassociates them from context, divests them of their agency, and makes them formally comparable as entities within a tabular system. By conceiving of this separation as 174

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ontological rather than as constructed, we remove the human agents who recognize, interact with, and value the art within potentially diverse contexts. Much as capitalism is marked by the alienation of labor from the means of production, the entry of an object (or ­intangible entity) into the category of “art” alienates form from the human. Reduced to its materiality, it becomes an object within a system alienated from meaning, lacking both agency and consciousness. The trauma of art resides in this denaturation of meaning, resulting in the repetition of its replacement described through the metaphor of proliferating images of the Simurgh’s feather. Taxonomized, the work can be seen, but never see; be spoken of, but never speak back. Contexts become subaltern to their replacement through a system of art. Distilled from the object, the human disappears as the spotlight falls on the alienated object.

The Simurgh’s Feather Decolonial art history must de-alienate the object, returning agency, articulation, and circulation to its makers and users even across the great divide of time and space in which users, and the meanings they/we attribute to objects, change and diversify. An art history establishing universal epistemic norms through European paradigms can only include multiple cultures by translating alterity into familiarity, effectively undermining its capacity for speech. Conversely, decolonization requires a proliferation of paradigms to account for the many epistemes erased through the universal imposition of the European colonial episteme of modernity. One tactic of such decolonization emerges in contemporary artistic practice: the creation of expressive paradigms that apparently rupture with history. Yet, such rupture affirms the Hegelian paradigm of dialectical progress through conflict and rebirth. Conversely, precolonial revivalism runs the risk of reifying the past in a sequence of visual forms, long used – as in modern renditions of the Simurgh – as symbols of timeless collective identity and nationalism. The decolonial must articulate the acolonial without attempting to repeat it.29 This comes not by resuscitating non-modern articulations of culture so much as by respecting their temporality. Life gains value not through perpetuity, but through mortality In his critique of the transcultural application of heritage to African legacies, Peter Probst captures the ambivalence of recognizing pre-colonial form as heritage by suggesting that “we are interested in the motivations of the image-makers, the roles they give to their works and the effects the works have on those who see and obtain them.” This interest enjoins us to ask, “What drives and nourishes the clinging to old forms and things past?”30 The analytical impulse contains an internal contradiction: we must simultaneously understand the articulation of meaning on the part of the (contemporary and historical) maker and recognize that the meanings to which we have access inevitably are corrupted through the dominant filters imposed by modernity, including the framing of art history and other disciplines that categorize objects. Historicism either leaves objects to sleep like Beauty in the glass coffin of the museum case or revives them with a primordial authenticity resistant to creativity and change. Conversely, the Simurgh’s feather offers a model for respect of the unattainable Other that we nonetheless attempt to articulate. What is this fabulous feather? It is an acolonial image whose mode of representation is unaware of and distinct from the “image” as theorized in the European tradition. Secularized from Christian roots making the absent divine tangible through the image, modern concepts of representation presume a linear relationship between signifier and signified. E ­ rwin Panofsky’s seminal method of iconographic analysis, published in 1939, encapsulates this 175

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modern paradigm. Transforming image into text, his method of “reading” paintings depends on interpreting signs as a code revealed through cultural knowledge.31 ­Emphasizing the initial context of a work’s communicative function, he suggested that our experience of a work is not individual so much as collective: we can read any artwork to the extent that we know its cultural code. Thus artworks can function as metonyms for culture based solely on form: the recognition of the form of a “simurgh” (or a “phoenix”) becomes equivalent to its decoding. If the painting fails to articulate a narrative relationship with the bird, then its presence is “decorative,” relegating painting to an entertaining craft rather than a serious “interpretive” art, as in the European tradition. Powerful as this method is, it relies on the universalization of a regional mode of representation as a paradigm for artistic communication. It presumes that the work of the image relieves absence, revealing presence to the eye. It ignores the observer-effect of the contemporary researcher seeking lost meanings. This modern idea of the representational image, emerging through European Christian discourses articulating the role of narrative imagery in the Western tradition, marginalizes the wisdom articulated in the Platonic tradition. In the dialogue Phaedrus, the figure of Socrates points out that, in painting as in writing, such re-placement is deceptive: the depicted figure is unable to respond to its reader.32 Thus, it becomes no more than the projection of the interpreter. The same could be said for iconology itself: the discourse representing the work that cannot speak for itself becomes as much a mirror of the interpreter as an articulation of the object. Recent art historiographies that pay attention to the role of contexts, art historians, collectors, and the power relations between them recognize and articulate this mirroring. Documenting and critiquing the histories contemporary disciplines, such as that of ­Islamic art history of which I am part, recognizes their historic complicity in colonialism without undermining the epistemic colonialism intrinsic to our discourses and epistemes. Thus, the eye-opening historiographic turn of the 2000s nonetheless perpetuates the very problem it critiques.33 As Agamben argues, “the capacity to recognize and articulate paradigms defines the rank of the inquirer no less than does his or her ability to examine the documents of an archive.”34 Even when historiography exposes the colonial, racist, and commercial underpinnings of our institutions, our failure to construct alternative narratives enables established paradigms to persist. The decolonization of art history depends not on including Others within epistemic paradigms emerging from Western European Christian norms, but on recognizing multiple paradigms of meaning. A decolonial art history not only describes the “Other” as established through coloniality but develops a voice with which to speak back to the presumed “Self” on its own terms. Inspired by the Platonic tradition in Islam known as illuminationism, the Simurgh’s feather articulates caution absent in iconographic interpretation. When we iconographically analyze the painting by Habibullah, the figure of the (relatively) modern hunter appears as an aberration from the medieval poem (Figure 11.3). A voyeur to a theatrical stage in the wilderness, he witnesses the moment in the poem when the Hoopoe, side-kick to Solomon, invites the birds on a quest. Extraneous to the text, he represents anybody who, while hunting, might come upon a gathering of birds. He is the paradigmatic witness; he is also the reader of the text. Does his gun merely display the modern technology owned by the sophisticated patron of the image, representing his power? Equipped with this weapon, does he shoot? Does he enact the hunt on which he set out? Does his hunt replace the epiphany in which the birds die? No. He sets aside his European rifle, putting his finger on his lips to express wonder. In witnessing the birds, he 176

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Figure 11.3  Habiballah of Sava, “The Concourse of the Birds,” c. 1600, Folio 11r from a Mantiq al-Tair, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 63.210.11.

recognizes the quest towards the Divine that their narrative represents. No wonder, then, that the Simurgh never figures in the painting: her presence is marked by his wonder, not by representation. The rifle can only meet its mark by pointing away. The apparent absence of the Simurgh actually marks her presence. Iconology cannot articulate an absent sign. Ironically, both the modern museum and the twelfth-century poetic descriptions of the Simurgh begin in China. While the former articulates a physical process dependent on conquest and trade in which the bird’s image is reproduced, the latter suggests the value of doggedly hunting knowledge, frequently cited as a saying of the Prophet Muhammad. Unlike the acquisition of knowledge and goods as tokens of power and accumulation, the resulting acquisition of knowledge “from China” enables a process of revelation that can never be fully apprehended in the image. Every image that fills galleries – every possible image in every possible museum, and every object used as an image to represent culture – e­ mbodies an attempt to represent a Truth all the more valuable because it remains perpetually partial. The Simurgh is so unattainable that we lack not only her but even her feather that we attempt to capture through its image. This irredeemable absence motivates every drive to redemption and drives the human longing towards presence through representation – whether that of the image, or of the museum in its quest to represent absences, particularly of cultures long gone. The Simurgh becomes the icon of the impossibility of the icon, and a reminder that every representation is a fetish, articulating both the trauma of loss and the excess value attributed to a commodity beyond its potential utility. The parable of the 177

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feather situates value not in our attainment and preservation of these images as fetishes, but in our valorization of the attempts to articulate Truth. Far from a rejection of images commonly associated with Islam, the parable of the Simurgh’s feather recognizes the necessity of image-making as a fecund activity articulating discovery and apprehension, valuing process over product.35 We honor the Simurgh by celebrating her feather which we perennially try to represent by relying on previous representations. Every representation fails. Yet, our perpetual trying, like the Phoenix always reborn from ashes, articulates our drive to knowledge. Translated into the complex modern intermingling of religion and secularism, atheism and culture, the parable of the feather provides a model in which making “feathers” takes precedence over preserving and describing them. The purpose of preserving becomes not to segregate the past into a realm of tradition, but to transform it into an active realm, a process of perpetual becoming. The value of investigation lies not in achieving the perfect answer, but in the continual quest to an inevitably imperfect rendition of Truth. A decolonial art history must relinquish the primacy of its subjectivity in order to respect and listen to what it does not already know.36 Rather than systematically governing all aesthetic objects of the world through uniform procedures of taxonomy and interpretation, it must be open to the incommensurability of cultures and their products. If art history turns out to be no more real than the representations that it categorizes, then art as well as history are both merely feathers. Each is destined to do the work of the other, succeeding and failing in equal measure. A decolonial art history becomes less a means of categorizing objects than of engaging and articulating understandings of the world that come from multiple sources, including the Simurgh’s feather. The analytical realm of “knowledge” turns out to be deeply intertwined with the articulations of making, whether expressed in prose, poetry, or art itself. When we recognize that the categorical, descriptive, and interpretive methods coupled with the narrative expressive structure of art history produce as much as represent the objects under analysis, then the distinction between object and subject, art and analysis dissolves – not unlike the birds dissolving in theophany. Our engagement with the decolonial cannot simply enable the recognition of objects within commodities of information and markets. Rather, it must inform how we think outside of our modern selves and how we might imagine the world otherwise. In this effort, we cannot segregate visual representations from the literature in which they emerged, nor can we segregate that literature from its contexts of communication. It is not sufficient to consider how an image illustrates a literary trope; we must also consider how that trope produces meaning in its changing intertextual and cultural contexts, often blending the sacral and the mundane in ways unimaginable from a modern position. If we insist on looking at the past and the other through modern epistemic rubrics including positivism and secularism, if we prefer prose to poetry and history to parable, we fail to listen to that alterity in its own Truth and instead use it merely as a mirror that affirms our own imagined omniscience. What is the cost of an infinitely failed attempt to represent the feather we cannot even see? Priceless. Where no money can change hands, there can be no commodity. Bereft of capitalism, we would celebrate the quality of the Phoenix, that of infinite rebirth, manifest again and again in each illusive Simurgh. We would situate art not simply in the crosshairs of when and where, but instead recognize the possibility that a voice that we do not control through our categories and might answer questions we do not yet know how to ask. Like

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the hunter in the painting of the birds in the clearing, we would set aside the sights of our knowledge-trained rifle to listen to the poetic, and perhaps even Divine, chirping of wonder.

Notes 1 Although considered non-authoritative, this frequently quoted saying (hadith) of the Prophet ­Muhammad reflects a widespread understanding, supported in other hadith, that Islam enjoins believers to actively seek knowledge despite potential hardships and from multiple, even distant, sources. See Kristian Petersen, “Understanding the Sources of the Sino-Islamic Intellectual Tradition: A Review Essay,” in the Sage Learning of Liu Zhi: Islamic Thought in Confucian Terms, by Sachiko Murata, William C. Chittick, and Tu Weiming, and Recent Chinese Literary Treasuries.” Philosophy East and West 61, no. 3 (2011): 546–559. 2 Johann Christoph Bürgel, The Feather of the Simurgh: The “Licit Magic” of the Arts in Medieval Islam (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 6. 3 Lenn E. Goodman and Richard McGregor, The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn, A Translation from the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 156–157n163, 162n170. 4 Alicia Walker, “Patterns of Flight: Middle Byzantine Adoptions of the Chinese Feng-Huang Bird,” Ars Orientalis 38 (2005): 189–216. 5 Wendy M. K. Shaw, What Is “Islamic” Art: Between Religion and Perception (Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 2019), 88–92. 6 For a similar association, see Deborah E. Klimburg-Salter, “A Sufi Theme in Persian Painting: The Diwan of Sultan Ahmad Gala’ir in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC,” Kunst des Orients 11 (1976–1977): 57–59. 7 For example, Alexis York Lumbard and Demi, ill. The Conference of the Birds (Bloomington IN: World Wisdom Books, 2012); Peter Sis, The Conference of the Birds (London: Penguin Books, 2013); Meghdad Asadi, dir. Simorgh (short film, 2014) 8 For a similar phenomenon, see Rozina Ali, “The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi,” The New Yorker, January 5, 2017. 9 The paradigm of modern progress posits supposed improvement among a single line of supposed development. By “cultures not delineated by modernity,” I refer to any culture, past or present, the epistemes of which are not dominated by the ideology of modernity, including Enlightenment universalism, dialectical progress, secularism, etc. 10 During the formative years of museum collections of Islamic art, art produced after the eighteenth century and regional expressions of modern art were considered too “Westernized” and thereby epigonic to be worthy of collection. While recent histories of global modernisms have recognized the diversity of modern art, few public collections have remedied this gap. The result is a norm that frames the Islamic as pre-modern, proto-national, traditional and regional, and the contemporary as universal with an unremarked rupture of several centuries in between. 11 Isfandiyar Attacks the Simurgh from an Armored Vehicle, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, accessed November 28, 2022 https://collections.lacma.org/node/239658 12 Tile with image of Phoenix, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed November 28, 2022 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/446207?searchField=All&sortBy=Releva nce&ft=simurgh&offset=0&rpp=20&pos=6 13 Isfandiyar’s Sixth Course, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed November 28, 2022 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/452653?searchField=All&sortBy=Releva nce&ft=simurgh&offset=0&rpp=20&pos=7 14 The late sixteenth-century Canon of Painting by Sadiqi Bey, court painter and librarian under the Safavid Dynasty, includes a decorative mode associated with China, khata’i, referring to Chinese floral designs and particularly common in manuscript illumination and wall painting. Thus, there was an indigenous corollary to chinoiserie, but the label instead uncritically applies to the late seventeenth-century European appropriation of Chinese motifs to the Persianate context. see Martin Bernard Dickson and Stuart Carey Welch, The Houghton Shahnameh, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Fogg Art Museum, 1981), 259–269.

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Wendy M. K. Shaw 15 Tile, The British Museum, accessed November 28, 2022 https://www.britishmuseum.org/ collection/object/W_G-217. 16 Eva Schulz, “Das Museum als Wissenschaftliche Institution Neue Ideen und Tradierte Vorstellungen am Beispiel der Sammlung Boisserée,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 51 (1990): 285–317. 17 Zoe S. Strother. “Looking for Africa in Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik,” African Arts 46, no. 4 (2013): 8–21. 18 Wendy Shaw, “Collecting Islam in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt: Modernization and the First Islamic Museums of Islamic Art,” in Maia Gahtan and Eva-Maria Troelenberg, eds. Collecting and Empires: An Historical and Global Perspective (Turnhout: Brepols-Harvey Miller Publishing, 2019), 336–359; Katarzyna Puzon, Sharon Macdonald and Mirjam Shatanawi, eds. Islam and Heritage in Europe: Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities (New York and London: Routledge, 2021). 19 Wendy M. K. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed: The Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 20 Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 21 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 35. 22 Tomoko Masuzawa. “Troubles with Materiality: The Ghost of Fetishism in the Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 2 (2000): 243; William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (1985): 5–17. 23 Pietz (1985): 5. 24 Strother (2013): 16. 25 Pietz (1985): 7. 26 Stephen Snyder, End of Art Philosophy in Hegel, Nietzsche, and Danto (London: Palgrave, ­Macmillan, 2018): 2. 27 William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (1987): 45. 28 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009), 78. 29 I use the acolonial here in contradistinction to the decolonial, defined as extracting colonial saturation. The acolonial represents a state not affected by colonialism, either by virtue of time (the precolonial) or isolation (such as indigenous peoples who remained unknown well past the colonial era). In avoiding the prefixes pre- and post-, this usage aims to eliminate the implications of temporal order and progress often implicit in discussions of colonialism. 30 Peter Probst, “Iconoclash in the Age of Heritage,” African Arts 45, no. 3 (2012): 12. 31 Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939). 32 Plato and Christopher Rowe, ed., Phaedrus (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 63 (275d3–e5). 33 Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, “The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field,” The Art Bulletin 85, no. 1 (2003): 152–184; Margaret Graves and Moya Carey, eds. “Islamic Art History,” Journal of Art Historiography 6 (2012); Benoit Junod, Georges Khalil and Stephan Weber, Islamic Art and the Museum (London: Saqi Books, 2012); Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Mschatta in Berlin: Keystones of Islamic Art (Berlin: Verlag Kettler, 2017); Moya Carey, Persian Art: Collecting the Arts of Iran for the V&A (London: Thames and Hudson, 2017). 34 Giorgio Agamben and Loca D’Isanto, trans. The Signature of All Things: On Method (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 32. 35 Finbarr Barry Flood. “Picasso the Muslim: Or, How the Bilderverbot Became Modern (Part 1).” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 67/68 (2016): 42–60. 36 Wendy M. K. Shaw. “Subjectivity and the Gaze in Islamic Discourses,” in Samer Akkach, ed. Nazar: Vision, Belief, and Cultural Difference (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 33–62.

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Selected Bibliography Bürgel, Johann Christoph. (1988). The Feather of the Simurgh: The “Licit Magic” of the Arts in Medieval Islam. New York: New York University Press. Carey, Moya. (2017). Persian Art: Collecting the Arts of Iran for the V&A. London: Thames and Hudson. Darbandi, Afkham and Dick Davis, trans., (1984) The Conference of the Birds. London: Penguin. Flood, Finbarr Barry. (2016). “Picasso the Muslim: Or, How the Bilderverbot Became Modern (Part 1).” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 67/68: 42–60. Masuzawa, Tomoko. (2000). “Troubles with Materiality: The Ghost of Fetishism in the Nineteenth Century.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42: 2. William Pietz. (1985). “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9: 5–17. Puzon, Katarzyna Sharon Macdonald and Mirjam Shatanawi, eds. (2021). Islam and Heritage in Europe: Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities. New York and London: Routledge. Rothberg, Michael. (2009). Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Shaw, Wendy M. K. (2019). What Is “Islamic” Art: Between Religion and Perception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shaw, Wendy M. K. (2021). “Subjectivity and the Gaze in Islamic Discourses.” In Samer Akkach, ed. Nazar: Vision, Belief, and Cultural Difference. Leiden: Brill, pp. 33–62. Shiner, Larry. (2003). The Invention of Art: A Cultural History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Snyder, Stephen. (2018). End of Art Philosophy in Hegel, Nietzsche, and Danto. London: Palgrave, Macmillan. Strother, Zoe S. (2013). “Looking for Africa in Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik.” African Arts, 46, no. 4: 8–21. Troelenberg, Eva-Maria. (2017). Mschatta in Berlin: Keystones of Islamic Art. Berlin: Verlag Kettler.

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SECTION III

Learning and Listening

12 WHERE’S DECOLONIZATION? THE OHKETEAU CULTURAL CENTER, INDIGENOUS SOVEREIGNTY, AND ARTS INSTITUTIONS Rhonda Anderson and Larry Spotted Crow Mann, with Jonathan P. Eburne, Stacy Klein, and Carlos Uriona What follows is a conversation, not an essay. This chapter began as an invitation from the editors, which we honor as an opportunity for collaboration and reciprocity. The ensuing conversation continues in this spirit. As Rhonda Anderson notes below, over the past several years many cultural organizations have published statements about their commitment to antiracism and decolonization. But what does this mean? Where does the work of decolonization take place, and what forms does it take? As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang wrote pointedly in 2012, decolonization is not a metaphor.1 Nor is it a theme, or even a topic. What does it mean to loosen the grip of white supremacy, to dismantle what Stephanie Morningstar elsewhere refers to as the “crystalline structure of settler colonialism” throughout Native and other BIPOC lives? What does it mean to dismantle this crystalline structure throughout the institutional, material, and epistemological foundations of cultural work, in art history as throughout the education system at large?2 What follows is a co-authored exchange that addresses such questions by documenting a concrete, site-specific instance of collaborative institutional decolonization (Figure 12.1).3 Native artists Rhonda Anderson (Iñupiaq-Athabascan) and Larry Spotted Crow Mann (Nipmuc) discuss the processes of organizing and community-building that have resulted in the formation of the Ohketeau Cultural Center, a Native-run arts and education organization in Western Massachusetts.4 First envisioned in 2017, the center’s mission is to provide a safe, rewarding, and enriching experience for the Indigenous community of the region. Ohketeau has already sponsored a robust series of programs, including artist residencies and a series of colloquia on “The Living Presence of Our History” (in collaboration with Double Edge Theatre), in addition to classes and workshops that include tanning, herbalism and medicine, weaving, and other traditional practices.

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Figure 12.1  “The Living Presence of Our History—Part V: A Conversation with Indigenous A ­ rtists Making Art for Social Change.” September 19, 2021, Ohketeau Cultural Centre/­Double Edge Theatre. ­Photograph by Travis Coe @ Ohketeau Cultural Center.

Our claim in the ensuing conversation is that the work of “decolonizing art history”— and of decolonization more broadly—involves more than a shift in the objects and methods of aesthetic contemplation, or in the visibility of BIPOC artists and scholars. While noting the growing recognition of the wide-scale looting, destruction, devaluation, and appropriation of art objects, human lives, and extractive resources that have characterized the past four centuries of colonial modernity, the authors stress the urgency of creating and sustaining new sites for Indigenous people, as well as Black and Brown people, to survive and thrive creatively, spiritually, culturally, and materially. It is a question not only of how to create such sites, but also of where: As Mann puts it, “where are we going to serve the people, the Indigenous people, the Black and Brown people? Contemporary institutions don’t meet their needs. And they never have.” Dismantling settler colonialism and cultural erasure demands generative practices of autonomization, reclamation, and healing, in order to build or rebuild infrastructures for material and cultural thriving.5 The Ohketeau Cultural Center is an effort to meet such needs on a local, organizational level. Its formation emerged through a series of conversations as well as a significant expenditure of time and labor. The process of founding a cultural organization such as Ohketeau thus offers a significant dialectical complement to the process of dismantling colonial and racist infrastructures throughout the world. Such a process does not take place in isolation. The artists involved in Ohketeau developed the organization in dialogue with the non-Native artists of Double Edge Theatre, who have served as partners—accomplices rather than allies—in Anderson’s and Mann’s endeavor to found an autonomous, Nativerun cultural center in rural Massachusetts.6 186

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Founded in Boston in 1982, Double Edge Theatre relocated in 1994 to a former dairy farm in the village of Ashfield, Massachusetts, USA, where the artist-run ensemble has been training, performing, and managing the farm ever since. The Ohketeau Cultural Center was founded in 2017 when Double Edge gifted a renovated nineteenth-century barn facility to Ohketeau. Ohketeau also has access to housing and facilities at Double Edge, along with a land share of the entire 110-acre Farm Center. The village of Ashfield, where both organizations are located, is the homeland of the ­Nipmuc Tribal People, who have been stewards of this territory for over 12,000 years; the Nipmuc territory also borders the neighboring and closely allied Pocumtuck, and the adjacent present-day Indigenous Nations surrounding the region: Massachusett and ­Wampanoag to the East; the Mohegan, Narragansett, Schaghticoke, and Pequot to the South; Mohican and Mohawk to the West; and Abenaki and Pennacooks to the North. The territory of the Nipmucs, which once stretched over 2,000 square miles, was forcefully taken from the tribe beginning in the early 1600s and continuing into the late 1800s. Today the Nipmuc Tribal land amounts to less than 30 acres. The authors of this chapter are not art historians. One of us is a (white, settler) university-­ based scholar, whereas the others are artists and culture workers involved in the foundation and leadership of Ohketeau and Double Edge, respectively. This chapter addresses the project on which its principal co-authors have been collaborating since 2017, which seeks to decolonize the practice of art, and the organization of and access to cultural networks, at the institutional level. Together we are interested in gathering models of institutional autonomy for Indigenous artists and culture workers that can also provide examples for how white, settler organizations and individuals, as well as other BIPOC institutions, can take an active role in the decolonization process—albeit a necessarily partial, strategic, and contingent one. This means upholding the concrete demands of decolonization on the economic and administrative level. It thus also means attending to the minutiae of fundraising and organizing, the cultural demands of land access and cultural survival, and the stewardship of artistic labor. Reckoning with centuries of genocidal settler colonialism demands an engagement in and with the present, a vigilance that includes fending off “predators” intent on capitalizing on BIPOC cultural labor, as well as dismantling economies of prestige and self-interest that can be so readily mobilized to invisibilize such labor. Rhonda Anderson: Larry and I have different stories about how the Ohketeau Cultural Center started. Here’s my version. It was early 2017, and I was supporting Larry by attending his talk about being a ­Nipmuc Water Protector, as Nipmuc means “People of the freshwater.” This was at the UMass ­Native Center, and I happened to sit next to Carlos, who was looking for Indigenous people to talk with about Double Edge Theatre’s town-wide Spectacle, which would take place that May. Stacy, Carlos, and the Double Edge team had tried to find information about Indigenous peoples in the area, and wanted to highlight this history in their Spectacle. They were told, “No, there were no Indigenous people here; there’s no one here now.” ­Essentially, the local Historical Society invisibilized entire communities. I ended up talking with Carlos, who invited me to visit Double Edge, tour the facilities, and see if I could suggest other Native peoples, communities, and Tribal leaders who might assist with their Spectacle. Eventually, Stacy said, “Hey, we’re renovating this barn” and she threw out some ideas: “Maybe we could have a library, where people could come and read about Natives.” And I thought, maybe instead of a library, we could create a community center where Native people could come and just be. 187

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There are Indigenous and NAIS centers in the region, just as there are Indigenous students at the colleges nearby. But it’s all very institutionalized. I think the wider Native community has a tough time attending events at those places, even though they’re open to the public. There is no space where Native people can just be Native people, where we can have our own gatherings, our own ceremonies, our own stories to tell, and not have an institution over our shoulders or an urban setting. I grew up in the town next to Ashfield, and I went to school in Ashfield, and I felt like I was the only Native person there. I have always appreciated this area, and I wanted to see other Native people come and appreciate their traditional homelands, which I consider absolutely gorgeous. Being out on that land and reconnecting to the land is a meaningful way to reconnect to yourself. You have a better idea of who you are and how you connect to the world when you’re in that natural place; you’re not battered by all of this noise of modern society—cars, traffic, screens. You’re more taken in by the natural environment and its circadian rhythms. I feel that this is a massive part of the ills in our community: not having access to the land, not having access to traditional medicines, not having access to safe spaces for ceremonies and gatherings. We needed a safe space. And Stacy said, “Come look at this space.” I had already seen the barns at Double Edge and saw the fantastic spaces that they’ve created from them. I could see ahead: this will be amazing. There were some introductions to various people from the Native community. Ideas took with some; with others it didn’t work out. It ended up being Larry and me, and we make a good team. We have the same visions for the future, and for our communities. Larry Spotted Crow Mann: Ohketeau is a Nipmuc word for “a place to grow,” which is what is happening here; it’s really living up to its name. We didn’t envision Ohketeau as a cultural center at first. It blossomed into this place because there was such a need for it. And we’re still learning, in the sense that this is all new. We’re the first Native-run and operated cultural center in all of central and Western Massachusetts—but not for lack of trying. Native people have been fighting for self-determination since the landing of the Mayflower. The obstacles are profound: institutional obstacles, the obstacles of racism and systematic colonization. There have been many impediments against uplifting each other in face of the ills within Native communities, and which prevent us from achieving what we need, because of the dysfunction that was brought down through trauma. This is what we try to address. Stacy and Double Edge were the right people at the right time. I’ve been doing culture work all my life—three decades now—and we’ve seen so many allies. I could go on about people who were just there to be deceitful, people who come around to exploit us, to take advantage. So when we see allies coming, we usually expect the worst. That wasn’t the case when I met the folks at Double Edge. I was hesitant at first, but then I went to one of their shows, We the People (2017), and I was blown away. I said, “I think these folks are for real. I’m going to stick around here a little bit.” And they are for real. We would not be where we are today without their support, and that’s the honest truth. As Rhonda says—we’ve been friends for just about all our lives—we had the cultural knowledge, and we had the connections, but we just didn’t have the support to make something like this materialize. That’s a historic problem for all Native people out there trying to make it. Rhonda: Stacy really opened the door for enabling access to our community, giving us access to a space that was so desperately needed. A big part of our success comes from Stacy’s ability to see how difficult it is for Indigenous communities to have access to the land. We’ve been dispossessed and removed from our land—I say “we,” but I’m from a 188

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different Tribal Nation and culture. In Massachusetts, most of the Indigenous communities have been forcibly removed from their land and no longer have access to it. Land identity is an incredibly significant part of who we are. For most tribal nations, their names and their communities identify with the land they’re on. This goes for most Indigenous communities on this continent: we’re an integral part of the land, not separate beings apart from the land. It was significant for Stacy to acknowledge this dispossession, and to understand that Double Edge had access to privileges not often seen in BIPOC communities, particularly Indigenous communities: notably, access to funding, access to philanthropy, and opportunities to take the reins of an organization and make it function properly. I’m Iñupiaq-Athabascan, from Alaska. My enrollment village is Kaktovik, on the Beaufort Sea, area 1002 of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In the late 1960s, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) was passed, and nearly 100 million acres were “returned” to Native people, plus hundreds of millions of dollars. Most of that money was invested in creating 13 regional organizations across the state of Alaska, the thirteenth being for “outside Indians.” Basically what the government did is steal our land, give it back to us, provide us with money, and then say: “You subsistence hunter-gatherer people, you’re now extractive industry businesspeople. Good luck!” Most of the organizations have failed. Since 1971, I’ve been a class A shareholder of Arctic Slope Regional Corporation and its subsidiary, Kaktovik Iñupiaq Corporation. I belong to one of the most vital organizations; there are two that are pretty strong, and Arctic Slope Regional Corporation is one of the strongest because of the extractive industry. Many of the Tribal values of Indigenous people are community-oriented, subsistence-oriented, and land-oriented. We have traditional values that go against being business owners, especially in extractive industries. That may not seem to explain a whole lot, but it does. Our traditional values as Indigenous peoples look to future generations and fly in the face of extractive colonization. We have a different rubric for running organizations. Our successes and our needs differ from non-Native organizations, so much so that failure is exceedingly common. We’re grateful to Double Edge for stepping in and assisting us in applying for grants and talking with philanthropic organizations. That wouldn’t usually happen. They recognized the need to decolonize the business side of things, and how to create reciprocity and relationshipbuilding. When Stacy and Double Edge gave us access to their land, it was huge; we could access the land for traditional medicines, for ceremonies. I’m starting to get a little weepy thinking about it. It’s starting to happen more and more across the country, particularly in the conservation sector. Conservation was created not to conserve land but to conserve the culture of white people and white people’s access to “unspoiled” land. More people should recognize that there needs to be decolonization of conservation and land access. This is Native land, and in conservation, the land usually doesn’t go back to Native people. Native people, the stewards of this land since time immemorial, are still left out of the loop. Through the Land Back movement there is greater awareness that conservation needs to involve accessibility for Indigenous people to steward the land, to have land tenure, and be able to use traditional environmental knowledge, particularly now during climate change. Stacy Klein: You are outlining more than Ohketeau here; you’re outlining what decolonization strategy needs to be—not only for arts and culture but also for business. It’s good to have models that can be articulated and reproduced. An important point you mentioned had to do with infrastructure. One of the things we’re seeing with foundations that are 189

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actually doing real BIPOC work is that they’re providing infrastructural support, rather than just saying “we’re giving you a hundred thousand dollars, good luck.” I think that’s key. Also, the invisibility you spoke about is important to underscore a thousand times. We attended that meeting at UMass because we were told by our local Historical Society that there was never a Native presence in these lands. We’re talking about one little historical society; imagine how many of those there are throughout the country, telling people that there was no native presence. There’s a fundamental thing that needs to change. The idea of reclaiming and rematriating land seems obvious, but it’s really not. It’s still thought of as … wrong … in most places, and you still have to convince people. Larry: This is all so new. What we’re doing now is going to shape the lives of those who are not even born yet. And it creates a model for other allies and Native communities to follow. That’s what we’re doing, and it’s needed now in this time of arts and cultural equity initiatives. Why are all these institutions suddenly wanting Black and Brown people to be involved? They’re looking at the demographics, and they’re looking at their wallets. So where are we going to serve the people, the Indigenous people, the Black and Brown p ­ eople? Contemporary institutions don’t meet their needs, and they never have. Those needs need to be met, and the questions folks have been asking need to be answered. Ohketeau Cultural Center is getting overwhelming support because there’s a need from the community itself. It’s an amazing phenomenon. I’ve written award-winning books and I’ve traveled to different parts of the world; that’s all great, but this is far greater because it’s something I never thought I’d see. And here I am right in the midst of it—using the experience Rhonda and I have accumulated over three decades to uplift other artists and bring them in. It also means knowing when to say “yes” and “no as well, because there are always predators out there for Indigenous people and people of color, seeking to take advantage. We have to keep a keen eye on this. I, as a traditional person, tell stories and perform in front of many people, but it’s a different world we’re now seeing, getting money and saying the right things and using the right language. These are things you have to do, and which have historically kept our people out. Stacy and Carlos have a very keen business eye and an understanding of the business of art, and they help get us into those places where we need to be. And once we’re there, people think, “Holy shit! These people are amazing. Where have we been?” Their embarrassment is levered by their belatedness. What took you so long? We’re grateful, but there should be a sense of embarrassment on their part that it took 500 years to start saying, “you should be at the table, too.” The gratefulness needs to be leavened by the understanding from funding institutions that they’re not doing us any favors. We have the right to be here. This is our home. It always has been. They’re the guests. They’ve been sitting at our kitchen table while we’re in the basement. And we’re finally opening the door. It’s been a crazy day. I’m hoarse. The kids are home, I’m a little sick. I’ll stop there. Carlos Uriona: I want to say something about your crazy day. That’s another piece of the colonization game. I hope that we can discuss not only grants, but also daily life itself. It’s very difficult, even for white people, to say, “I have an idea I want to pursue, but I need to negotiate these other entanglements.” We are entrapped by a colonial daily life that enforces the paradigm that we are isolated individuals, separated from the land, the community, our ancestral lineage, and from what is divine and immanent. “I need to make the coffee, I need to go to the office, I need to get a babysitter.” To start imagining something else is very difficult. That’s why it’s so difficult to bring in people to be 190

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partners. I think about this every day; that’s my job here. I think every day about how we can bring in other Native people to work with Ohketeau, and how we can bring in people to work with Double Edge. I associate this difficulty with the issue of grants. One thing I wish to add is that I don’t want to be an ally. I want to be an accomplice. I want to be someone who steps in. Larry: Once Rhonda and I realized that Ohketeau was going to be more than a place to hold ceremonies, but an active center for events, we recognized how important it was going to be for our community. We made a conscious decision: we volunteered our time. Countless hours, day and night, all through the night. We may get an epiphany about something; we’ll call Stacy; Stacy will call us, because she’s up all night anyway; we’ll talk to Carlos. We willingly gave up hours and hours, and it’s a sacrifice. As an artist I’ve always understood this, and I know Rhonda does too. Having said that, we can’t go to a community that’s impoverished and marginalized and expect Native artists simply to come and do what we’re doing. They need to keep the lights on. They need childcare. They need food. They need gas in their cars. They need education. They need health care. None of these things are available to them in the way they should be. That is an incredible burden to put on them as they are trying to perform their art, while they have no one to watch their kids or can’t keep their lights on. This is why funding is so crucial: for the proper remuneration for their work. When Rhonda and I make that sacrifice, we see the bigger picture of what can be accomplished here. We’re going to do it because we want to bring in other artists and help them reach that platform we’ve been able to have as artists. Like current artists-in-residence André Strongbearheart Gaines and Tomantha Sylvester, and so many other amazing young artists who are out there: the platform of Ohketeau is going to be a big lift for them. It’s a great joy to offer that. But we need to be putting money in their pockets, too. We need to make sure they’ve got food, and they’re not suffering from the expense. That’s something I’ve always taken notice of as a Native writer, when I had to fight to get my work out there because the Indigenous genre is considered a niche, and because as a Brown artist I wasn’t given the respect and attention the work deserved. I had to fight and claw to get my voice out there. So now, I want to use this platform to put up others in that place. That’s what Ohketeau is able to do. And yeah, it’s also a way of sticking it to all the assholes. Rhonda: We have an enormous number of issues we deal with daily as Indigenous communities, and most people don’t see them. We’re invisible to mainstream society. Through the “Living Presence” series, people have seen us internationally as well as locally. I would never have imagined that, but Stacy did. She pushed us to expand who we are and I’m grateful for that. Larry: It’s amazing to have these multi-faceted components of the Ohketeau Cultural Center. We’re educating allies and accomplices and educators, and that’s a powerful piece in itself. And then we’re providing for our community, for their needs, whether it’s information on COVID vaccines or substance abuse, cultural education, opportunities for creative arts, or places just to come and be and express themselves. That’s just for them, with no outside interference or where they’re coming to be a spectacle, but where they can just be a Native person and create and enjoy themselves in ceremony. We didn’t really see that at first; we weren’t planning that. As Rhonda said, that was Stacy’s vision. We can’t emphasize that enough; Stacy is really a special person to make that happen. When I read that article about the genesis of Double Edge, when they came to Ashfield and experienced anti-Semitism and it was very disturbing—you wonder, what’s wrong with people?—Stacy 191

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and others recognize what it’s like to be treated as outcasts. Now we can tell the town, if you didn’t like Jewish people, just wait till you see what’s coming next! Now they hear the drums, and they see Brown people driving around and in the stores. I want to give them some solace and let them know that these were the first people here, so take comfort in that. It’s nothing new or strange. And it’s only making the town better, bringing back that reconnection with the land, which it needs. It has been a beautiful thing, and for them as well. I think the town of Ashfield is really embracing it. When I go around town, for the most part everybody’s nice, so it’s really uplifting and enjoyable to go out there. Jonathan: Rhonda brought up the importance of distinguishing Ohketeau from extractive corporations as well as and from institutions like colleges and nonprofit foundations. You’ve both invoked the daily work involved in the business of collective self-organizing. What does it mean not to be an Institution-with-a-capital-I in the sense Rhonda described, but still to do the work that those other institutions pride themselves on providing? What does it mean to do institutional work differently, and for Indigenous people and not just for white settlers? Rhonda: I think it means unapologetically being who we are and laying it out in no uncertain terms: this is what we’re dealing with, this is what we need to do. We need to decolonize, we need to refocus an Indigenous lens on our history and our contemporariness, which will benefit everybody. Not just our Indigenous communities, but everybody. It’s been a struggle. We’ve been told flat-out: we’re not funding you because you’re an activist. We lost a grant because I’m an activist. And that’s not okay, because as Indigenous people we are born into activism; we’re constantly fighting for our most basic and fundamental human rights. We’re unapologetically doing this work, and we’re straight-up saying: this is what we need to do. I think there has been a more robust recognition, particularly after the murder of George Floyd. People are starting to ask: whose backs are we standing on; who are we suffocating just so that we can live as a society? I think that has been a turnaround. Hopefully, that woke movement will continue to sustain the fundamental work of social and racial justice. It is challenging, and I know it has been a big problem for BIPOC organizations, and especially Indigenous organizations, to constantly fight for our basic human rights. To fight for our activism, to make sure that our land is here for our next seven generations. I mean, potable water! Water is a basic human right, no? To make sure that we don’t have to go to school with a derogatory, racist mascot. All these things are microaggressions or macroaggressions that we’re constantly fighting, and it gets to be too much after a while. It can be really challenging to fight for civil rights constantly. We are unapologetic about what we’re doing. Larry: We’re building pathways, because the colonial pathways weren’t meant for us. They were designed to keep us out, and they’re still doing that. In Ohketeau we’re rebuilding these pathways, ways to get our people in, who have been historically been kept out. This means dealing with us in an Indigenous way, on different levels, to meet the needs of the community. As they say: meet people where they are. Learn that you have to deal with Indigenous people. You have to go into the communities. You have to talk to the people. Other institutions don’t have a history of doing this. You can count on both hands and your feet and someone else’s the white-led Native organizations that are doing “Indian work,” but they don’t have a grasp on the communities because they’re not working for the communities. They’re working for other organizations 192

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and institutions, and that’s usually where the money goes. Or it goes to an individual like myself, who is invited to come and perform, but my tribe still doesn’t have the water, still doesn’t have the land. This is the way it keeps you in perpetual slavery. Ohketeau is changing that; it’s about empowering ourselves. And it starts with building pathways, to redefine what it looks like to get opportunities. Stacy: Foundations have their work cut out for them in trying to identify Native organizations, in order to represent a BIPOC cohort in their funding profile. They tend not to know much about Native organizations working on their own, because they’re still really invisibilized on account of racism and genocide in their communities. And white people are afraid of the land back movement. Rhonda: You’re absolutely right. I have sat on panels for a state-run philanthropic organization that shall remain nameless. They are reinstituting new policies system-wide in their organization to address systemic racism. Their policy was filled with glorious terms like “racial bias” and “social justice,” “racism” and “antiracism”—“antiracism trainings,” antiracism this and antiracism that. I looked at the policy and said: amazing! Where’s decolonization? We’re invisibilized in your policy. There’s no mention whatsoever of I­ndigenous people; there’s no mention whatsoever of decolonization. Because when you’re looking at decolonization, you’re looking at the very root of racism in this country. That was mind-blowing for the person leading the effort, who was a BIPOC person themself. They never thought of that. We’re slowly making changes by addressing the root of these issues. This means owning up to the fact that colonization isn’t just historical; it’s a contemporary thing that’s happening today. We need to address this. We’re making changes. Larry: Speaking of making changes, it’s much easier to have Rhonda or me or another Native artist come to an institution to speak or perform than it is to support Ohketeau becoming an institution unto itself, with its own agency, its own power. This is self-­ determination. Some see this as a threat. But this is the kind of change we’re grasping, because one of the tenets of our teachings, as with most Native tribes, involves passing it on. If Rhonda and I can’t pass on all these things we’ve done to the next generation, then it’s not worth it. Ohketeau has the opportunity to do this. I was honored to hold a residency this year at Bunker Hill Community College. They have partnered with Ohketeau to build a permanent Indigenous curriculum into the graduation requirements. This is not just talking about the Lakota or somebody far away; it’s about the local tribal people: about the Native people taken to Deer Island, the land taken from the Nipmuc people, the battles that happened here, the Nipmuc men and other tribal people who served during the Civil War. This will be built right into the BHCC graduation curriculum, and also at Greenfield College and several other organizations who are working with us. We’re becoming a hub for education, where they can redefine the terms of their education. As Rhonda said, that’s where changes are going to happen: where we’re educating future generations. In the classroom. Rhonda: The education of colonialism begins in kindergarten, with the myth of ­Christopher Columbus and Thanksgiving. It snowballs from there. We’re hoping to make changes on that level as well, which is challenging. Speaking of myths, the Doctrine of Discovery is still being used against us as Indigenous people in the Supreme Court.7 Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself actually used it against Indigenous tribes as recently as 2005. These are things most people don’t understand. Most ­people don’t realize how many sovereign nations there are in the United States. There are over 570 sovereign nations here—individual, governmental countries. Most people have no idea. 193

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I make a point of including three action items in every land acknowledgment I make.8 This is all tied into making changes. You don’t want a land acknowledgment to be performative, to tick a box. Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back! You have to do the research. All the tribes in Massachusetts are easily researchable; in the age of internet access, there’s no excuse to be ignorant. Contact somebody, an elected tribal representative, and ask them what is needed. Do you have needs, anything you would like allies to help you with? Of course there are. This is part of creating a relationship and making it reciprocal: not mining cultural nuggets but asking “what can I do to help you.” That is the start of a relationship, the beginning of acknowledging that there are Indigenous people here and they are still struggling. Of course, a land acknowledgment also acknowledges the land and how much she/it gives to you, and it makes sure there is caring for the land. But including action items gives people a place to begin a real relationship. Those action items are constantly being updated, and they’re different for every area. But that’s the job of making a land acknowledgment: to actually do that research, to reach out and ask what someone can do to lift Indigenous voices and communities. Larry: It takes Indigenous people to help with these land acknowledgements, as Rhonda says. But people in these organizations also have to realize that when the land acknowledgements are read there are going to be some uncomfortable sentences, and usually it amounts to their culpability. The institution reading it needs to be accountable. It’s not an abstract reading; there need to be terms in there about their role in genocide, in atrocities, segregation, redlining, and keeping Black and Brown people out of their organization for the last three or four centuries. If they don’t account for that, then they’re not doing their job. It’s easy to say, “some bad things happened to Indians, and we’re separating ourselves from that.” No. The founders of your institution were usually part of it. That needs to be part of those land acknowledgements. Rhonda: My town recently created a resolution, which I helped write. I used words like “intentional genocide,” “cultural genocide,” “dispossession,” and “war.” They came back and said, “we can’t have those terms in our resolution, because it’s too violent.” And I’m thinking, well, that’s the truth of it! That’s why we’re having this proclamation, to acknowledge this. Stacy: You can’t just make a land acknowledgement that uses other people’s work because you couldn’t bother to do your research. You have to actually listen, you have to change, and you have to offer something. A major question for me is: what’s the model for listening? Listening doesn’t take a genius. What Ohketeau is doing to provide a space for listening and teaching is happening in a very kind way, in my opinion. I’ve learned so much in the last year and a half, just by listening. Once you start listening, you can do anything, and change will really happen. If you listen to Larry and Rhonda, you already want to go out and rip down some racist mascots. Also, I’ve learned that some of these things, like offering land sharing, are really not that hard. People don’t even use their land. They barely cut their grass! In western Mass, there are thousands of acres of land owned by private individuals that could be shared. Rhonda: When I’m done giving a land acknowledgement, I always say: “Quyanaq Naalagnigavsi.” That means, “Thank you all for listening.” I have a lot of gratitude for people who listen. It opens up your heart, it opens up your mind. You might not agree, but at least you’re listening, and that’s a big step in the right direction.

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Larry: For those who don’t know, the US has never publicly apologized for the genocide against Indigenous people. During the Obama administration there was a written apology buried on the 45th page of a Department of Defense paper; it was very brief, and at the end there was a disclaimer, saying that none of what was just said holds the United States to be bound by any laws or regulations or lawsuits. So that was that.

Notes 1 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. 2 Stephanie Morningstar, “The Living Presence of Our History - Part III: Healing and Reparations Through The Land Back Movement: A Conversation on Indigenous Land Tenure and Access.” Ohketeau Cultural Center, March 21, 2021. https://www.ohketeau.org/living-presence-series. See also Irvin Hunt, “This Bridge Called the System: An Interview with Stephanie Morningstar.” Dilletante Army (Winter 2021). https://dilettantearmy.com/articles/this-bridge-called-the-system. 3 This conversation is transcribed and edited from a zoom discussion in late 2021. 4 See the Ohketeau Cultural Center website: https://www.ohketeau.org/our-mission 5 See Lisa Tanya Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (­Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 6 See the Double Edge Theatre website: https://doubleedgetheatre.org/ 7 On the Doctrine of Discovery, see the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007): https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/united-nations-declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples/ 8 See https://www.ohketeau.org/living-presence-series.

Selected Bibliography Brooks, Lisa Tanya. The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hunt, Irvin. “This Bridge Called the System: An Interview with Stephanie Morningstar.” Dilletante Army (Winter 2021). https://dilettantearmy.com/articles/this-bridge-called-the-systemOkheteau Cultral Center. “The Living Presence of Our History.” Web Series (August 2020–present). https:// www.ohketeau.org/living-presence-series Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, No. 1 (2012), 1–40. United Nations General Assembly. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. (13 September 2007). https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-­content/ uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf

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13 OVERCOMING ART HISTORY’S META-NARRATIVE Deborah Hutton

About a decade ago, at an exhibition of Rinpa-style Japanese art in New York, I overheard a conversation that remains vivid in my mind for what it reveals about the ripple effects of what we might call art history’s meta-narrative—that is, the story created by the ways art history is typically structured. It was midday, midweek, and the gallery was empty except for myself and two women who seemed to have spent considerable time in art museums. They were going through the exhibition slowly, studying each artwork with care. They paused before the folding screen, Irises at Yatsuhashi, by the artist Ogata Korin, to consider it.1 After some murmurs of appreciation, one of the women said, “Doesn’t this work remind you of Vincent van Gogh’s Irises painting?”—an apt comparison, to be sure.2 Her friend excitedly agreed, and then added, “The artist must have been influenced by van Gogh. I wonder how he knew about van Gogh’s work.” Eventually one of them noticed the date on the wall label accompanying Korin’s screen: “Wait … this says it’s from the eighteenth century. Didn’t van Gogh live in the nineteenth century?” By this point, I am shamelessly eavesdropping, anticipating the moment when they realize their mistake—that the inspiration was actually the other way around. After a few seconds of silence, one grabbed the other’s arm and whispered, “You know what? The museum must have gotten the date on the label wrong,” to which her friend replied, “Oh dear, you are right … do you think we should tell them?”

***

What was—and remains—striking about the above incident for me is that these women clearly had studied at least some art history, admired the Japanese art on display, and genuinely wanted to learn about the works, but their belief in the West as the location for artistic innovation and creativity was so ingrained that when confronted with evidence to the contrary, their reaction was to assume the evidence was wrong. One might say that they absorbed the unspoken lesson of art history too well, for, as this chapter posits, the longestablished narrative of our discipline, the one that still circulates in popular conceptions, is based on—and serves to reify—the belief in a thing called Western Civilization as the location of progress and the center of cultural achievement. And while welcome changes have been and continue to be made (for one, the importance of Japanese art in and of itself DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-17 196

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let alone its important role as an inspirational source for European Modernism, widely ­recognized at the scholarly level, is now increasingly communicated at the popular level), the discipline as a whole has not yet fully reckoned with, much less dismantled, its colonialist and nationalistic structure. Thus, even if the particular misconception I witnessed might not happen again, similar ones (or less humorous but more damaging ones) will persist until we collectively address art history’s structural problems, beginning with the category of Western art. And we need to do this work not only in our scholarship or upper-level teaching, but also (or perhaps, especially) in introductory-level courses—the courses taken by undergraduate students from a wide variety of majors for general education credit that serve as public faces of our academic inquiry, and the very courses that often operate, through their titles, organization, and content, as passive upholders of art history’s structural meta-narrative.

The Struggle for a More Equitable and Inclusive Art History A few years before I overheard the Irises conversation, I became interested in the scholarly discourse driven by questions of how to make art history global.3 What might a truly global history of art look like? Is that even possible? Is it perhaps better to aim for a worldly one, that is one which recognizes the movement of people, objects, and ideas throughout time as well as the ways in which local histories are entangled with wider ones, rather than attempting a comprehensively global approach?4 Intrigued by such queries, I began re-directing my academic efforts toward joint research projects, problem-solving-based undergraduate seminars, and—eventually—collaborative textbook writing aimed at introductory-level survey courses.5 Central to each of these endeavors was a desire to breach the geographic and hierarchical boundaries marking our discipline, and from the start, it was clear that collaboration was crucial to any success in that regard. At the same time that I was pursuing these ventures, cogent calls to decolonize art history—and vital conversation about what it means to invoke the term “decolonize”—were gaining steam, and that discourse further shaped my work, underscoring the importance of collective and concrete action.6 From these ongoing endeavors, several additional lessons have emerged. For one, if our goal in making art history global is to increase inclusivity and equitability, continuing to diversify content without also confronting the discipline’s colonialist, nationalist, and racist underpinnings will not work. As Craig Clunas has noted, in many ways art history has been global since its inception in late eighteenth-century Europe, with cross-cultural comparison forming an integral part of the earliest analyses; however, those germinal writings employed the art of other cultures merely as a foil against which European art could shine more brightly.7 Adding globally diverse content, particularly in introductory courses and written materials, can end up reinforcing the perceived primacy of Western art if we leave unchallenged the Eurocentric assumptions on which art history has been built, ones embedded in the very terminology we use and the questions we ask.8 But, conversely, if we focus on confronting the imperialism and racism embedded in the discipline without simultaneously expanding the content on which we focus, we run the risk of continually recentering European and North American art—that is to say, we may change the conversation surrounding the art, but we will still be focusing our analytical gaze on only a small portion of the world’s art, reproducing false impressions about which cultures, past and present, have produced art worthy of study. Therefore, to meet our objectives, we must simultaneously decolonize and globally expand the discipline, transforming not only what we study 197

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and teach, but also how and why we do so in a way that values multiplicity, mobility, and divergence without reifying differences along cultural or national lines. The good news is that many art historians are doing this work—indeed the amount of outstanding new research and pedagogical projects seeking to reposition what we do is heartening.9 However, those individual efforts do not yet seem to have had the collective impact we might wish on the discipline as a whole, which remains stubbornly Eurocentric.10 There are many reasons why this might be the case, but I posit that one key obstacle is how art history is organized, whether in the layout of encyclopedic art museums, survey textbooks, or undergraduate curricula. That structure repeatedly centers and reaffirms the category of Western art and creates an underlying narrative working against the many changes we as individual scholars and teachers are trying to make.

Art History’s Structural Meta-Narrative In Myth of the Continents: A Critique of Metageography, Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen deconstruct the basic spatial structures through which we perceive the world, including, as the title suggests, the seven continents taught to school children. By tracing how geographical units have changed over time, the authors demonstrate how such divisions are politically produced and historically contingent rather than scientifically based.11 These culturally constructed divisions, in turn, form the structure through which knowledge about the world is organized, leading to misconceptions. For example, the fact that, say, Europe and Asia are each classified as continents suggests not only that they are discrete entities, fundamentally different from one another, but also that they are roughly comparable in terms of size, population, and the degree of internal homogeneity regarding characteristics such as culture, climate, flora, and fauna. Lewis and Wigen dismantle such assumptions, showing that Asia is in fact more accurately understood as series of distinct regions—East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, and Southwest Asia (the last linked to North Africa)—each of which is equivalent to Europe in size, diversity, and degree of internal homogeneity versus heterogeneity. Ultimately, the authors propose a new way of dividing up the world into 14 regions that they argue, while still flawed, is “more modest, honest, and accurate” compared to traditional meta-geographies, which effectively serve to “as visual propaganda for Eurocentrism.”12 There are parallels between geography and art history, notably the way both disciplines produce visual frameworks for understanding the world. What, then, if we perform a similar exercise with regard to art history? An analysis of art history’s basic structure finds it cleaved in two between “Western art” and “non-Western art.”13 Western art—its name suggesting art from a bound geographic region but in fact referring to art from Europe as well as other predominantly White societies marked by European settler-colonialism such as North America and Australia—is typically positioned as the normative center and allotted the bulk of the space, whether in museum floorplans or college curricula. It is then subdivided into time periods familiar to art historians and non-art historians alike: Prehistoric, Ancient (which, notably, includes art from ancient Egypt and the Near East— a point I shall return to later), Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Modern. These time periods are further subdivided stylistically and/or geographically, often corresponding with ­nation-states—e.g., Italian Renaissance, French Impressionism, and American art (by which is typically meant art of the United States from late eighteenth century to the present)— but the primary structural logic is chronological.14 The rest of the world, by contrast, is 198

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­ ivided g­ eographically: Asian art, African art, art of the Americas (not to be confused with d ­American art), and Oceanic art. Only with smaller geographical units, often corresponding with modern nation-states, are time periods a factor: art of ancient India, Edo Japan, or colonial Mexico, for example. Then there is Islamic art, a convoluted category that combines religion with shifting, sometimes disputed, boundaries shaped by geography, time, and perceived artistic characteristics.15 Islamic art is at times framed narrowly and positioned as a subcategory within the medieval period of Western art. More often it is recognized as having a broad geographic and temporal span, in which case it is classified as non-Western.16 In this organizational map of art history, the sole category that seems to be allowed to freely transcend the Western/non-Western divide is also the most recent one—global contemporary art—­implying that art has become global only recently. This structure, which, to paraphrase J.M. Blaut, we might call “the colonizer’s model of the world’s art,” is clearly problematic.17 To begin, it assigns change over time as the fundamental characteristic of Western art and stasis as the dominant characteristic of the rest of the world’s art—a false but pernicious characterization with a host of ramifications (I am reminded of my surprise a few years ago when several well-meaning anonymous reviewers suggested that it would be helpful if, in our global art history textbook, we could address why Asian art doesn’t change in the same way that European art does). So much does Western art “own” chronological development that art history programs frequently give undergraduate courses on periods of European art titles like “Ancient Art,” or “Medieval Art” without feeling the need to specify any geographical focus. Europe is assumed. When a course does take a global approach to a time period, that fact is more likely to be signaled by its title than a course focusing solely on Western art (e.g., “Global Modernisms,” compared to, say, “Modernism”). This framework also creates false equivalencies over-emphasizing the West. It suggests, for example, that medieval European art is somehow equivalent in scope (in the amount and diversity of art) to all of African art from prehistory to present, rather than recognizing that African art also has ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern periods, each one a more apt unit of comparison with a particular time period of European art. The problem is multiplied when one is talking about the arts of Asia. As Lewis and Wigen—and many other geographers—demonstrate, the sweeping label “Asia” comprises multiple distinct regions, each equivalent to the (relatively tiny) continent of Europe. In terms of visual culture, each of these regions (South Asia, East Asia, etc.) has a chronological progression as complex and dynamic as that of Europe, one completely hidden by the overarching structure of our field.18 Additionally, the structure locates modernity within the realm of Western art, positing Modernism as the climax of the narrative arc.19 In this construction, progress with a capital P (endowed with ideas about artistic innovation and creative genius) is understood both as an unquestioned good and as the implicit goal—born in the West and spread to the rest of the world. While this assumption has been challenged at the scholarly level, so deeply is this narrative engrained in popular perception that even ardent art aficionados may be surprised and confused when presented with evidence to the contrary (such as, say, Korin’s Irises at Yatsuhashi pre-dating van Gogh’s Irises). Undergirding all the issues listed above is art history’s most basic division—the Western/ non-Western divide. By now, to assert that this binary division of the world is problematic is both obvious and not at all new.20 Yet, to suggest with all seriousness that we dismantle it still appears to be an unrealistic goal, much like trying to catch wind in a net, to paraphrase a Japanese idiom. Nevertheless, the following sections aim to do just that. 199

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The Myth of Western Art Few art historians will defend the term “non-Western,” which lumps together diverse ­cultures and labels them by what they are not rather than what they are, but many will lamentably confess that without a good alternative, they find themselves defaulting to the term.21 The problem, though, isn’t merely the terminology. It is the term’s underlying belief system. To put it bluntly, non-Western art only exists as a category because Western art does, and the whole idea of Western art—of Western Civilization more broadly—is a relatively recent construct, one developed in post-Enlightenment Europe as part of the rationale to justify imperialism and settler-colonialism. To be sure, the idea of the West has its roots in Latin Christendom, a notion of identity that emerged in opposition to the perceived threat of Muslim power within medieval ­Europe. The construction of a distinct European identity further developed during the ­Enlightenment, when, among other things, it incorporated false beliefs about racial hierarchies, which were used to justify the paradox of upholding equality and liberty for some while enslaving and killing others.22 As Europeans explored and settled in other lands, they took with them this idea of White, European, Christian exceptionalism, which in their eyes was linked to an unbroken and singular connection to ancient Greece and Rome—never mind that much of the Classical knowledge they admired had been preserved by Muslim scholars in Baghdad and beyond, rather than by European Christians. However, the specific idea of Western Civilization as both “heritage and object of study” emerged only in the nineteenth century alongside European imperialism, and solidified in the twentieth century with the advent of the Cold War, as the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah and others have cogently argued.23 Notably that time frame coincides with art history’s formation as an academic discipline as well as the establishment of many encyclopedic art museums, both emerging from—and seen as providing “proof” of—this new world view.24 Yet, the very make-up of Western art provides evidence of its own fabricated nature. For example, why is ancient Egyptian art included in the canon of Western art, but later art from Egypt excluded? Egypt did not move. Moreover, if we compare, say, an example of ancient Egyptian art with a contemporaneous ancient work from across the Mediterranean, we will find less visual and conceptual commonality between them than if we compare a twelfth-century Islamic artwork from Egypt’s Fatimid dynasty with a twelfth-century work from a European Christian kingdom—art made for Roger II (1095–1154) of Sicily proves that point.25 Likewise, why is ancient Mesopotamian art part of the story of Western art, but an artwork from, say, mid-twentieth century Baghdad is not? Interestingly, the Fatimid art example would easily fit within the category of Islamic art; however, in most Islamic art textbooks, the mid-twentieth-century Iraqi artwork would be left out.26 Under such scrutiny, not only does the narrative of Western art reveal itself as a construct incorporating imperialist strategies of cultural domination through select appropriation and Othering, but also the very category of Islamic art becomes suspect. As Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom point out, “Islamic art as it exists in the early twenty-first century is largely a creation of Western culture.”27 By this statement, they mean that the grouping together of artistic traditions “encompassing the lands between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans” is a product of European and North American scholarship from the nineteenth century onward. I would take this line of thinking further: the categories of Western art and Islamic art are symbiotic creations—one cannot fully exist without the other. Both are informed by geo-political concerns that seek to set up a “civilizations” model of the world 200

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in which differences are codified and the West is the standard against which everything else is measured. Moreover, for the West to claim the unbroken mantle of progress from Classical times to the Modern era, it helps if the history of Europe’s nearest neighbors is truncated at either chronological end, as the category of Islamic art, which traditionally is framed as beginning in the seventh century and ending roughly in the nineteenth century, serves to do (whether or not that was the intent). Notably, even the common way of referring to West Asia in art historical discourse shifts from “Near East” when discussing the ancient world to the “Middle East” thereafter, as if once the region’s dominant religion becomes Islam, it moves slightly but decidedly away from Europe and Western Civilization. There are other problems with the category of Western art: it marginalizes art from northern and eastern Europe, not to mention Russia, which is given very little art historical space in stark contrast to the size of its geographical, historical, and political footprints. It separates Native American art from American art in deeply problematic ways. For example, two early twentieth century artworks made in the same region of the United States and both featuring abstraction are often compartmentalized differently within art history’s structure, one as an example of “Indigenous traditions” and the other as “modern art,” depending on the artists’ acknowledged ethnic heritage, as if the artists lived in completely sequestered cultures, rather than representing the ethical and social complexities of a ­settler-colonial society.28 In these ways, the category of Western art obscures the rich diversity of the world’s artistic heritage while codifying ideas of difference that serve the agendas of nationalism, imperialism, and oppression.29 Yet—and here’s the rub—even if we recognize that the narrative of Western art is a pernicious myth, it is a deeply entrenched and imbricated one that has existed in our collective imaginary for roughly a century and a half. During that time, artists all over the world have produced powerful, engaging works in response to this perceived heritage—whether embracing, rejecting, appropriating, or reframing it. Likewise, multiple generations of art historians have been trained within this structure and produced important scholarship delineating the contours of our field. Through this art and scholarship, the idea of Western art has been given tangible form and, in turn, impacted societal developments far beyond visual culture (the economic impact of heritage tourism, for example). To deny that reality would be a fallacy. The question then becomes: at this point, is art history permanently tethered to the narrative of Western art, or is there a way to acknowledge its far-reaching impact and to study the artworks it shaped without further reinscribing it and the bifurcated worldview it represents? I believe the latter is possible. In fact, I posit that some relatively simple changes to art history, if done collectively and aimed particularly at how it is framed at the undergraduate level, can begin to move us away from this worldview as we work on the long-term project of decolonizing, expanding, and re-imagining our field.

A New Structure: Toward an Entangled, Ethical History of Art Let me put forth one modest example as a place to start in the hopes that it will lead to more radical change. During the writing of our global art history textbook, we—the authors and editors—collectively agreed not to use the term “Western” to describe any art made before the eighteenth century. It was an easy rule to abide by because, in fact, there is no pedagogical or historical reason to use it: no one before the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries would have thought of themselves as part of or outside of something called Western Civilization. When the textbook does introduce the idea of the West (in a chapter on Neoclassical art in 201

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Europe and North America), it is as a concept rather than a reality.30 Thereafter, our text uses “Western art” sparingly, only when the beliefs underpinning the category are crucial to understanding a particular artwork or art movement. Non-Western is never used to describe art. I know that we are not alone in these choices; others also have moved in these directions. What if the field of art history more broadly followed suit? What if we collectively as art historians in the academy stopped using the terms “Western” and “non-Western” in course titles, textbooks, and curriculum requirements, replacing them instead with names of straightforward geographical regions that avoid the competing civilizations model of the world? For example, the Survey of Western Art might be renamed the Survey of European and North American art (depending on what is covered, of course, and with an honest effort made to include the full scope of North American art, especially Indigenous art). Similarly, what if we stopped allowing Western art to maintain its status as the universal, unspoken norm? Imagine if our expectations shifted so that courses or textbooks with titles like “History of Photography,” “20th-century Art,” or “Medieval Art” were assumed to be global. A college course or book covering art from only one or two regions, even if that region was Europe, would be expected to reflect that in its title: “Medieval European Art,” for example. Renaming may seem a superficial and symbolic fix, but it can be a powerful and substantive first step toward deeper change. Moreover, it is a way of clearly signaling to a general audience the individual changes many of us are already making in our teaching and research; it is a way of quickly and publicly declaring them at a moment when the discipline of art history urgently needs to assert its continued relevance within the shifting landscape of higher education. It also is a step that can be undertaken by anyone, regardless of disciplinary training or department budgets. Altering naming practices in those ways also facilitates the development and use of art historical time periods understood to be globally applicable, whether those periods are ancient, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary or some other temporal breakdown. To be sure, there are legitimate critiques of the adoption of a global chronology for art history: it universalizes a Western framework for understanding time in a strictly linear fashion and reinscribes problematic ideas about modernity and progress. Such critiques need to be kept in mind, and culturally appropriate measures of time certainly should be employed alongside broader categories. However, at the end of the day, if we are to overcome the meta-narrative of art history—which is not only an ethical imperative, but also, I believe, crucial to the discipline’s longevity—we need to create a structure that recognizes all art changes over time and that allows us to traverse geographic borders, to explore the ways in which local histories are entangled with wider ones. As Parul Dave Mukherji has said, at some point “disruptive pedagogy has to move beyond ideological critique and embrace the laborious task of writing art history of the ignored region but within a plural, comparative/relational sense”—as “entangled art histories.”31 Broadly understood chronological periods allow us to do this work, while also serving to decenter the West as the perceived location of artistic innovation and change. Modern art, for example, will no longer be framed as belonging to Europe and North America. Every region will be recognized as having a modern period, one that intersected with global trends in some ways and diverged from them in others. Most crucially, by unseating “Western art” as the field’s primary organizational unit and instead historicizing its emergence in post-Enlightenment Europe as a concept for solidifying 202

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the power structures of the modern world, we make room for the difficult but meaningful discussions of art history’s role in maintaining those power structures. Such conversations, especially at the introductory level, reveal to students and other non-­specialist audiences how and why art history matters. They also highlight the ethical implications of art historians’ work—in ways that are not always flattering or easy to reconcile with our self-­ perceptions.32 However, at a time when the value of the arts and humanities is increasingly being called into question, confronting the meta-narrative of art history, perhaps paradoxically, is a way of claiming its worth, of demonstrating not only the powerful role art history has played in shaping how people perceive the world, but the equally vital role art history can serve in creating a more equitable and inclusive society, if we just shift our frames of vision.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank De-nin Lee for her feedback on this chapter as well as for the many pertinent conversations over the years about the state of art history. Likewise, many of the ideas I present here were formulated through conversations with Rebecca Tucker, Priscilla McGeehon, Jean Robertson, and the many smart, witty students in my Decolonizing and Diversifying the Museum seminar—my sincere gratitude to each of them.

Notes 1 Ogata Korin (Japanese, 1658–1716), Irises at Yatsuhashi (Eight Bridges), Pair of six-panel folding screens, after 1709, Edo-period Japan, Metropolitan Museum of Art 53.7.1,2. https://www. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39664 2 Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), Irises, Oil on canvas, 1889, Saint-Rémy, France, J. Paul Getty ­Museum 90.PA.20. https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/826/vincent-van-gogh-irises-dutch1889/ 3 See, for example: James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? (The Art Seminar) (New York and London: Routledge, 2007); Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried Van Damme, World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008); David Carrier, A World Art History and Its Objects (State College, PA: Penn State University Press, 2009). 4 In his review of David Carrier’s A World Art History and Its Objects, Terry Smith writes: “A worldly art history would, surely, be one that examines the ways in which worlds of all kinds and dimensions have been and are brought into being, in artworks as objects, in their circulation through space and time, as they resonate in the imaginations of those who see them. It would devote considerable energy to tracing the trafficking in artifacts, the exchanging of artistic ideas, the differentiation and fusion that have occurred for millennia as cultures come into and go out of contact.” www.caareviews.org, October 22, 2009. 5 Collaborative research projects: Deborah Hutton and Rebecca Tucker, “The Worldly Artist in the 17th Century: Cornelis Claesz. Heda and his Travels from Haarlem to Bijapur,” Art History 37/5 (November 2014): 860–889; Hutton and Tucker, “A Dutch Artist in Bijapur,” in The Visual World of Muslim India: The Art, Culture and Society of the Deccan in the Early Modern Era, Laura Parodi, ed. (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2014), 205–232. Textbook projects: Jean Robertson and Deborah Hutton (lead authors), with Cynthia S. Colburn, Ömür Harmanşah, Eric Kjellgren, Rex Koontz, De-nin D. Lee, Henry Luttikhuizen, Allison Lee Palmer, Stacey Sloboda, and Monica Blackmun Visona, The History of Art: A Global View (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2021); De-nin D. Lee and Deborah Hutton, The History of Asian Art: A Global View (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2022). 6 See, for example: Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1: 1 (2021): 1–40; Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price (eds), “Decolonizing Art History,” Art History, 43: 1 (February 2020): 8–66; Huey Copeland,

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Deborah Hutton Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Pamela M. Lee, “A Questionnaire on Decolonization,” October 174 (2020): 3–125. 7 Craig Clunas, “The Art of Global Comparisons,” in Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the Twenty-First Century, Maxine Berg, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 165–176. 8 In their exploration of a similar topic, Melissa R Kerin and Andrea Lepage call out one such example in Gardner’s Art through the Ages: Non-Western Perspectives, 14th edition. Melissa R Kerin and Andrea Lepage, “De-Centering “The” Survey: The Value of Multiple Introductory Surveys to Art History,” Art History Pedagogy & Practice 1: 1 (2016): 6. https://academicworks. cuny.edu/ahpp/vol1/iss1/3. Similarly, Gayed and Angus point out how N. Rosenblum’s, A World History of Photography (4th edition, New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2007) incorporates some global content but ultimately ends up recentering a Eurocentric perspective. Andrew Gayed and Siobhan Angus, “Visual Pedagogies: Decolonizing and Decentering the History of Photography,” Studies in Art Education 59: 3 (2018), 233. 9 There are far too many examples to list in any sort of comprehensive way, but to begin, I might point to recent books published by the National Gallery Singapore that expand how we think of Modernism: Sarah Lee and Sara Siew, eds., Reframing Modernism: Painting from Southeast Asia, Europe and Beyond (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2016); Sze Wee Low, ed., Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia since the 19th Century (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2015). On the pedagogical side, the April 2021 roundtable, “Teaching the ‘Long’ 18th-Century” organized by Sarah Betzer and Dipti Khera and hosted by UVA’s Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures highlighted the exciting work being done by seven art historians “who have been at the forefront of efforts to rethink approaches to thinking, researching, and, crucially, teaching the art and material culture of an interconnected ‘long’ eighteenth century,” as quoted on the event’s webpage, https://ihgc.as.virginia.edu/teaching-long-18th-century-­ roundtable, which includes a recording of the panel. 10 For example, in 2016, Kerin and Lepage surveyed 66 art history programs at institutions of higher education and found that 84% prioritize the Western art survey in some way. Kerin and Lepage, 3. 11 Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, Myth of the Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). 12 Quotes from Lewis and Wigen, 10. For a discussion of the world regional scheme which they put forth, see Lewis and Wigen, 186–188. 13 It is important to note that no single, codified structure exists, and variations can be found. For my analysis, I drew on the most common way art history is organized in college curricula including distribution requirements for art history majors, course titles, professorial areas of expertise listed on department websites, the table of contents for survey textbooks, and the layouts of encyclopedic art museums. Robert Nelson has similarly “mapped” art history by examining how Ph.D. dissertations were grouped by the College Art Association, art history books were organized in the library classification, and survey textbooks were structured. His results largely align with what I lay out here. Robert Nelson, “The Map of Art History,” Art Bulletin 79: 1 (1997): 28–40. 14 Daniel Larkin pointed out that this chronological framework can be traced back to the Louvre’s opening in the midst of the French Revolution. It first opened in 1793, but quickly closed in order for the art to be rearranged in a more orderly manner. Its reopening in 1794 became a pivotal event in art history because for the first—but certainly not the last—time, the arrangement of the artworks “was rigidly chronological, separated according to national schools.” Daniel Larkin, “How the Louvre Codified Essentialism in Art History,” Hyperallergic (March 15, 2021). 15 For more on the category of Islamic art, see Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, “The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field,” The Art Bulletin 85: 1 (March 2003): 152–184. As recently as 2006, art historians were divided on whether art made by Indonesian Muslims should be considered “Islamic art.” See Jane Perlez, “Embracing Islamic Art from Southeast Asia,” The New York Times (March 17, 2006). https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/ arts/embracing-islamic-art-from-southeast-asia.html?smid=em-share 16 For example, in H. W. Janson’s History of Art (4th edition, New York, H. N. Abrams 1991), which focuses exclusively on Western art, a single chapter on Islamic art is included within the section on Medieval art. By contrast, in many undergraduate curricula, Islamic art is seen as fulfilling

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Overcoming Art History’s Meta-Narrative the “non-Western” distribution requirement, and in the College Art Association Ph.D. dissertation categories, cited by Nelson, Islamic art is listed as its own category positioned between Asian art and African art. Nelson, 29. 17 J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guilford Press, 1993). 18 Even Smarthistory (https://smarthistory.org/), the online site that is meant to facilitate the up-todate teaching of art history, has the entirety of Asian art as a single category, while European art is allotted four categories—divided chronologically. 19 Art history is not alone in this regard. As Lewis and Wigen point out, “the metageographical distinction between the West and the rest of the world is particularly debilitating when married to a key metahistorical concept: the notion that the West is coincident with modernity and that the non-West can enter the modern world only to the extent that it emulates the norms established in Europe and northern North America.” Lewis and Wigen, 7. 20 I am far from the first person to write about the problematic nature of this construct. See, for example, Phoebe Dufrene, “A Response to Mary Erickson: It Is Time to Redefine ‘Western’ and ‘Non- Western’ Art, or When Did Egypt Geographically Shift to Europe and Native Americans Become Non-Western,” Studies in Art Education 35: 4 (1994): 252–253. 21 Kerin and Lepage note that in their study of collegiate art history programs, they were “struck … by the persistent use of “non-Western,” even at colleges and universities that had abandoned the Western survey as a major requirement.” Kerin and Lepage, 3. 22 See, for example, Jamelle Bouie, “The Enlightenment’s Dark Side,” Slate (June 5, 2018). 23 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilisation,” The Guardian (9 November 2016). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/western-civilisation-appiahreith-lecture. See also Lewis and Wigen, 47–62. 24 For a discussion of some of art history’s developments as an academic discipline during this period, see Carolin Overhoff Ferreira, Decolonial: Introduction to the Theory, History and Criticism of the Arts (lulu.com, 2019), 19–20. 25 See, for example, Emily A. Winkler, Liam Fitzgerald, and Andrew Small, eds., Designing Norman Sicily: Material Culture and Society (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2020). 26 See, for example, Barbara Brend, Islamic Art (London: British Museum Press, 1991); Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair, Islamic Arts (Arts & Ideas) (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 1997); Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Art and Architecture (World of Art) (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998). This state of affairs is changing, with some recent publications ­incorporating examples of modern and contemporary art; however, the relationship between these works and the category of Islamic art often is an uneasy one. For example, being included in the category of “Islamic art” poses a problem for some contemporary artists who reside in predominantly Muslim societies but do not identify their work as Islamic. 27 Blair and Bloom, “The Mirage of Islamic Art,” 153. 28 For more on what a settler colonial history of art might look like, see Damian Skinner, “Settler Colonial Art History: A Proposition in Two Parts,” Journal of Canadian Art History 35/1 (2014): 130–175. 29 In a discussion of neocolonialism, Mahmood Mamdani cogently argues that we may have shifted our language “from that of exclusion (civilized, not civilized) to one of inclusion (cultural difference)” but the aim is still the same, that is “to manage and reproduce difference.” Mamdani is not specifically talking about art history, but as Blake Stimson has pointed out, these points very much apply to those of us in the humanities and social sciences. Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2012), 44. Blake Stimson, “Deneocolonize Your Syllabus,” Nonsite.org Issue 34 (February 2, 2021). 30 Robertson and Hutton, et al., 927. 31 Parul Dave Mukherji, “Retooling Art History via Disruption: Postcolonialism Reconsidered,” lecture delivered at the 109th Annual College Art Association Conference (February 12, 2021). The conception of entanglement as a method of understanding cultures is perhaps most famously articulated by Édouard Glissant in Poetics of Relation (trans. by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 32 For more on the ethical dimensions of art historical teaching, see Karen Overbey, “Towards the ­Ethical Practice of Art History,” Material Collective (August 31, 2018). https://thematerialcollective .org/towards-theethical-practice-of-art-history/

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Selected Bibliography Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “There Is No Such Thing As Western Civilization.” The Guardian (9  ­ November 2016). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/western-civilisationappiah-reith-lecture. Blair, Sheila S., and Jonathan M. Bloom. “The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field.” The Art Bulletin 85: 1 (March 2003): 152–184. Gayed, Andrew, and Siobhan Angus. “Visual Pedagogies: Decolonizing and Decentering the History of Photography.” Studies in Art Education 59: 3 (2018): 228–242. Kerin, Melissa R., and Andrea Lepage. “De-Centering “The” Survey: The Value of Multiple Introductory Surveys to Art History.” Art History Pedagogy & Practice 1: 1 (2016). https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ahpp/vol1/iss1/3. Lee, Sarah, and Sara Siew, eds. Reframing Modernism: Painting from Southeast Asia, Europe and Beyond. Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2016. Lewis, Martin W., and Kären E. Wigen. Myth of the Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Nelson, Robert. “The Map of Art History.” Art Bulletin 79: 1 (1997): 28–40. Overbey, Karen. “Towards the Ethical Practice of Art History.” Material Collective (31 August 2018). https://thematerialcollective.org/towards-theethical-practice-of-art-history/. Robertson, Jean, and Deborah Hutton, et al. The History of Art: A Global View. New York: Thames & Hudson Inc., 2021. Skinner, Damian. “Settler Colonial Art History: A Proposition in Two Parts.” Journal of Canadian Art History 35/1 (2014): 130–175.

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14 PATHWAYS TO ART HISTORY Pedagogy, Research, and Praxis through a Decolonial Lens Ananda Cohen-Aponte

I consider an overlooked aspect of decolonial discourse as it applies to art history: the inequities of access to art historical education for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) youth in the United States prior to the university level, and the implications this holds for efforts to decolonize the field. The obsolescence of arts education in the K-12 school system continues to disproportionately impact low-income public schools, and particularly those with majority “minority” student populations. In a 2011 report through the research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, the authors identified “art deserts” in three predominantly Black and Latinx school districts in Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, with ratios of arts specialists (including music, visual art, dance, and theater teachers) to students at 1:356 in Boston, 1:480 in Chicago, and a staggering 1:704 in Los Angeles—a district that was 85% Black and Latinx at the time of the report’s publication.1 Modest strides have been made in recent years; bipartisan leadership managed to prevent Donald Trump’s proposed slashing of the NEA and other major federal funding agencies for the arts in 2021.2 Within the specific field of art history, the number of AP Art History courses offered in US schools increased from 1,661 in 2009 to 2,009 courses in 2021.3 Nevertheless, the internalization of a whitewashed art historical imaginary among all youth, but whose impacts most profoundly and deleteriously impact youth of color, presents one of the most significant obstacles to the decolonization of art history. One need simply to look at the vast majority of children’s books, coffee table books, cartoons, and documentaries related to the visual arts to realize that the creative production of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other people of color at any time in history has been effectively erased and supplanted by a recurring set of about ten white male ­European and US artists. Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Warhol are household names, yet most would be hard-pressed to name five artists outside of the Eurocentric framework in which art is packaged to us in a variety of physical and digital formats.4 Considering the urgent calls since the brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020 to center Blackness and Indigeneity in the decolonization of our museums, universities, and curricula, these efforts are but a finger on a gushing wound. Decolonizing art history must first begin with a recognition of the magnitude of the issue. What are the mechanisms that convert the work of white male artists into common knowledge yet render invisible entire 207

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histories and civilizations? Or worse yet, trivialized and sensationalized via action movies or even the so-called History Channel? Educational scholar Angela Valenzuela writes about the “intellectual and spiritual deserts” endured by students of color in the educational system, who are doubly marginalized for the lack of access to culturally affirming curricula, compounded by disparities of arts funding within the US public school system.5 The profound gaps, silences, and intentional disfiguration of the rich art histories of the global majority wend their ways into the K–12 classroom, the public and municipal spaces of the US, and the modes of entertainment we consume. In the absence of alternative sites of learning, seeing, and creating, these exclusions limit the imaginative capacity of youth and non-youth alike. Building on Robin D. G. Kelley’s notion of “Freedom Dreaming” and its subsequent invocations by scholars like Bettina Love in an educational context, I see the suppression of the vibrant artistic worlds of people of color, past and present, from the visual purview of our youth as inflicting a form of trauma that stifles dreams and creative imaginaries. Such indignities require a radical shift in not only the kinds of art education offered to youth but the pedagogical models that can facilitate the centering of art histories of the global majority. Love contends, Abolitionist teaching is built on the radical imagination of collective memories of resistance, trauma, survival, love, joy, and cultural modes of expression and practices that push and expand the fundamental ideas of democracy. Art is freedom dreams turned into action because ‘politics is not separate from lived experience or the imaginary world.’6 Sefanit Habtom delves even deeper in her discussion of arts-based abolitionist education in Toronto as a liberatory practice for Black and Indigenous youth. She argues, The abolitionist imaginary is cultivated through arts-based practices, pushing the boundaries of thinking and expanding what is possible. As we learn from generations of abolitionist organizers, abolition is as much about building and creating alternatives as it is about dismantling oppressive systems and structures. Storytelling, fiction, and speculative works lend themselves to imagining more livable futures.7 To this, I would add that art historical education at the pre-college level is fundamental for students of color to disabuse themselves of the implicit message that they are a “people without history,” and in so doing, to recognize themselves and their communities vis-à-vis a vibrant visual history of radical creativity and ingenuity in the face of oppression. As I and my colleague Elena FitzPatrick Sifford have discussed in a previous publication, the burden of filling in yawning gaps between a whitewashed arts curriculum (if one exists at all) often falls on parents or community organizations.8 Scholars Alba Isabel Lamar and Lynette Guzmán point out in their study on Latinx curricula, My parents did their best to account for our omitted, occluded, misrepresented, or subsumed narratives by teaching their children our epistemologies, our people, through books, music, food, cultural events, and family vacations. In adulthood, now I realized what a disservice my education had been.9 I bring out these perspectives from the field of education, and particularly in the ­subdisciplines of Abolitionist Pedagogy and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies, because we cannot speak 208

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of decolonizing art history if we do not set our sights on the 13-year lead-up to the college classroom. In an era when the teaching of anything other than a triumphalist, white supremacist narrative of US history in our K–12 curricula are under attack and, indeed, are in the process of being effectively banned from the US educational system, it is more important than ever that the project of decolonizing art history is in conversation and collaboration with educators and practitioners before and beyond the university. As reported by education journalist Sarah Schwartz, Since January 2021, 42 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism, according to an Education Week analysis. Seventeen states have imposed these bans and restrictions either through legislation or other avenues.10 The suppression of educational opportunities for students to access their own histories, coupled with the disproportionate educational disadvantages suffered by BIPOC students during the COVID-19 pandemic heavily impact the possibilities for art history to un-­ discipline itself in the service of decolonization. If we only focus on university-level pedagogy and research, then we have lost the opportunity to cultivate pathways to multiply marginalized youth to obtain a foundational knowledge base of not only art history but of critical frameworks for deconstructing the white supremacist fields of vision that dominate our worlds. There are several institutions and initiatives that are reimagining arts and art history education for students of color, and particularly Black youth, which offer an important blueprint for how to reconstitute the field. The Art History + Curatorial Studies at the Atlanta University Center (known as the AUC Art Collective), a collaboration between Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse, and Spelman College, has a fully funded four-week Early College Program for rising high school juniors and seniors of color interested in the arts to gain critical knowledge about African American and African diasporic art history and curatorial practice. The program, under the leadership of inaugural director Cheryl Finley, includes site visits to galleries and museums both within and around the Atlanta region.11 Other initiatives operate wholly outside of the institution of the university and the museum. The Black School is currently in the process of being built in New Orleans’ 7th Ward at the time of this writing. The Black School, which began its programming in Fall 2022, is “an experimental art school teaching radical Black history” through youth education in the arts. Modeled on the Freedom Schools and the Liberation Schools of the Black Panther Party, the Black School is based on the following principles, which are accessed through art-making: self-love, health and wellness, Black feminism, prison abolition, self-defense, LGBTQIA rights, community building, Black radicalism, environmental justice, and economic justice.12 The AUC Art Collective and the Black School are doing integral work in decolonizing art and art history in their youth-centered focus. Institutions are also in desperate need of educational materials to support these kinds of initiatives. Olivia ­Chiang, associate professor of Art History at Manchester Community College in Connecticut, edited the digital textbook, Not Your Grandfather’s Art History: A BIPOC Reader, hosted on the Smarthistory platform, which provides a survey of art history devoted to historically marginalized communities, authored primarily by BIPOC scholars. The text is geared t­oward a community college undergraduate audience, another important community for whom culturally relevant arts curricula is long overdue. 209

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Further, it is important to place art history in collaboration with Ethnic Studies at the university level. As Adriana Zavala has argued, cross-listing our courses with Latinx Studies, Indigenous Studies, Asian American Studies, and African American studies, when ­applicable, is critical for shifting the demographic landscape of our classrooms as well as ­broadening the disciplinary scope of art history and visual studies.13 Fears of an Ethnic Studies invasion of the arts and humanities is hinged on a few core existential preoccupations: the assertion of its relevance to contemporary descendant communities of the artistic traditions of the Global South and its diasporas; the privileging of scholarly voices from those communities; yielding art history to other scholarly and epistemological frameworks grounded in decolonization; and the misguided assumption that decolonial approaches lack historical rigor. Yet, transhistorical approaches that privilege decolonial frameworks do not have to come at the expense of historicity. It is often contemporary artists, activists, novelists, and poets who yield generative insights on colonial art through their aesthetic practice, which allows scholars to ask new questions of the material and to propose new ways of thinking about the object.14 One such artist is Sandy Rodriguez, a Chicana contemporary artist based in Los ­Angeles who creates works on paper for her ongoing series, the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón (2017–present), which includes botanical illustrations of native plants from the southwest and border region of southern California and cartographic illustrations that draw from the themes and iconographies of early colonial compendia of Aztec life and knowledge such as the Florentine Codex (1540–1585) and the Codex de la Cruz Badiano (1552) (­Figure 14.1). Much has been written on Rodriguez’s extraordinary paintings, executed on amate paper (a handmade paper endemic to Central Mexico made from the outer bark of the fig, jonote, and mulberry trees) with hand-processed pigments collected during her field studies.15 Rodriguez’s work has been the subject of a number of important scholarly articles, but for the purposes of this chapter I focus on her three-week artist residency in Ithaca, New York, as part of the Mellon Migrations grant convened by co-PIs Ella Maria Diaz, Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora), and myself, which provided an immersive co-learning and cocreating experience with faculty, students, and community members on the homelands of the Gayogo̱hó:no¸’ people.16 The residency began with an inaugural event organized by Rickard that introduced the Indigenous languages and place-making epistemologies that shape the lands where Cornell University is located. Following Hodinöhsö:ni protocol, Sandy was brought in as a welcomed guest onto Gayogo̱hó:no¸’ land, which set the tone for the remainder of the visit. Following Kanien’kehá:ka scholar Sandra Styres, this protocol established the lands upon which Rodriguez would undertake field study and draw inspiration for future projects, as living, emergent, and storied.17 One of the most enriching experiences of the residency was an invasive species workshop led by Afro-Puerto Rican farmer Rafael Aponte and Sandy Rodriguez at Rocky Acres Community Farm. Rocky Acres is a 30-acre farm located in Freeville, New York, that combines the spirit of activism with the transformative healing aspects of nature. This workshop introduced high school students in the inaugural cohort of Ithaca’s Youth Farm Project Social Justice Immersion Program for BIPOC youth to focusing on native and foreign plant species in an ecosystem. The workshop began with a discussion of the Emerald Ash Borer Beetle, which has destroyed hundreds of millions of ash trees in the United States in the past two decades since its initial introduction via wood-packing materials from Asia. Aponte then moved into a discussion of a plant grown at the farm that would be considered foreign or “invasive” to the Central New York biome: the güiro, or bottle gourd (Lagenaria 210

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Figure 14.1  Sandy Rodriguez, Mapa de la Región Fronteriza de Alta y Baja Califas, 2017.  Handprocessed dyes and watercolor from native plants and earth pigments on amate paper, 47ʺ w × 94.5ʺ h, JP Morgan Chase Art Collection. Photo by J6 Creative.

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siceraria), used as a percussion instrument in the Caribbean and its diaspora. The bottle gourd is native to Africa, but according to Kistler et al., is “the only [domesticated plant] with a global distribution before pre-Columbian times.”18 Through systematic analysis of DNA from 86,000 samples of bottle gourds distributed across the world, both through living and archaeological specimens, they concluded that Lagenaria siceraria dispersed from Africa to the Americas during the Pleistocene through oceanic drift.19 Further, the buoyancy of gourds allows them to float on salt water without the seeds being disturbed.20 In other words, this gourd can be considered endemic both to the Caribbean and Africa, where it was cultivated, dried, and carved into a “friction idiophone,” or a scraping instrument by Black and Afro-Indigenous specialists as the foundation of a variety of vernacular and religious musical traditions of the Caribbean and northern South America, from salsa and bachata to cumbia (Figure 14.2).21 After Aponte’s presentation of the cultivation of the güiro and the process of drying and carving in its transformation into musical instrument, Rodriguez led a color demonstration, where she introduced youth participants to the practice of foraging and processing plants and minerals of the Americas in the creation of pigments and dyes. The students then painted the gourds using the pigments that Rodriguez had created including cochineal, Maya Blue, and red ochre. Through collaboration between an artist and farmer, this workshop connected Black and Indigenous ecologies and cultivation practices, situating the güiro at the intersection of deep histories of artistic and musical expression on both

Figure 14.2 Güiro. Gourd, Cuba, late 19th century, 15 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Crosby Brown Collection of Musical Instruments, 1889.

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sides of the Atlantic Ocean. While the gourd, now cultivated on the unceded homelands of the Gayogo̱hó:no¸’ people, is displaced from its original homelands of both Africa and the Caribbean and South America, it can be better understood within the framework of what environmental scientist Jessica Hernández describes as “displaced relatives”: plant species that were introduced to the Americas post-contact through ecological displacement, but subsequently brought into relation with Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, and Afrodescendant diets and agroecological practice.22 Through Aponte’s rematriation of the güiro to Rocky Acres and Rodriguez’s use of Mesoamerican pigments in their decoration, they wove together a hemispheric practice of land stewardship and art-making as an act of repair. What does this have to do with art history? I introduce here Sria Chatterjee’s important provocation for a special issue of British Art Journal entitled “The Arts, Environmental Justice, and the Ecological Crisis”: Artistic research and new strands of interdisciplinary art history that goes beyond eco-criticism have created a space for scholarly and artistic activism for environmental justice. As the field of art history expands and broadens, can art historians critically rethink concepts that are fundamental to art history, such as time and scale, in ways that are productive for an intersectional eco-politics? Is it time to also question traditional configurations such as “culture” and “design” in a multispecies context?23 This workshop extended the truncated life cycle of a work of art (in this case, the carved and painted güiro) to include the deep histories of oceanic drift, domestication, and intimate relationalities between humans and plants in both West Africa and the Americas prior to colonization. Art historical practice typically begins with the finished work of art as the locus from which to begin one’s analysis. With the rise of the “material turn” in art history, more attention has been given to the histories of colonialism, slavery, and environmental exploitation, as well as localized, place-based knowledges that govern the materiality of artworks. Continuing this line of thought in our investigation of the arts of the Americas that straddle colonization, a consideration of the deep histories of objects that includes the agricultural, ecological, and aesthetic practices that inform the works enables us to appreciate the vast reservoirs of knowledge and relationality with the land that characterize objects like the carved güiro and its representation in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx art.24 The workshop took place not within a university classroom or in a museum or gallery space, but inside of a greenhouse using folding tables and hay bales as seats. The siting of the workshop also defied normative spatial hierarchies that characterize the classroom, with the professor standing at a podium facing several rows of seated students. The space of learning and co-creation divested from the transactional model of education as articulated by Paulo Freire, and privileged a circular formation that allowed for equitable participation.25 Educational experiences such as this one can do the important work of demonstrating unexpected connections between agriculture, herbalism, and art history that may encourage youth to continue to ask questions and to pursue art history at the university level, and to make art an integral part of their lives (Figure 14.3). This case study allows us to rethink the necessary tools of art historical praxis, research, and pedagogy. In doing away with the museum, the classroom, and the normative art object, this event, along with the other programming associated with the grant, opened a new space for rethinking the “what, when, where, and why” of the work of art history.

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Figure 14.3  View of the invasive species workshop on Rocky Acres Community Farm. Photo by Author.

This, of course, is not to discard the basic building blocks of the discipline, but to radically embrace not only interdisciplinarity, but other domains of knowledge and praxis entirely, such as farming and herbalism in art historical research and pedagogy. The painted güiro, a constantly evolving musical and aesthetic art form, would rarely figure as the subject of an art historical lesson or workshop despite its great importance to the artistic and musical traditions of the Caribbean; we need to look no further than Francisco Oller’s iconic painting El Velorio (ca. 1893), which pointedly depicts an elderly man leaning up against the door shutter playing a güiro in the background, to understand the profound entangled histories of Afro-Indigenous life, culture, and ritual in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. This activity also blends multiple temporalities, not only stretching us back into the realm of deep, geologic time, but in the interplay of cyclical, agricultural and ritual time with the linear timelines imposed by colonialism. The conscious decision to host an art historical and artistic workshop on a Black-owned farm on unceded Gayogo̱hó:no¸’ land that practices agroecological land stewardship breaks away from traditional educational protocols and allowed for a horizontal exchange and co-creation of knowledge. Finally, the “why” of the workshop was in the service of introducing a new generation of BIPOC youth to the interconnections of art, music, materiality, and agriculture in the Caribbean and the African diaspora. This intervention can offer a different lens to approach art history in a moment of ongoing crisis that begs for ways to redraw the coordinates of a liberated future.

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Acknowledgments Special thanks are due to Charlene Villaseñor Black, Tatiana Flores, and Florencia San Martín for inviting me to participate in this volume, and for their insightful feedback in the preparation of this chapter. I am grateful to Ella Maria Diaz, Jolene Rickard, and Sandy Rodriguez for their friendship, support, and collaboration. Ginger Spivey has graciously shared insights on the shifting landscape of AP Art History curricula and offerings in the US, and Olivia Chiang has likewise shared her perspectives on the importance of decolonizing art history in the service of community college education. Many thanks as well to the students of the Youth Farm Project, Astrid Castillo, Rafael Aponte, and finally to Madonna Lee for the inspiring example she sets as an elementary school educator in the South Bronx who tirelessly advocates for the arts in her school.

Notes 1 Nick Rabkin, Michael Reynolds, Eric Hedberg, and Justin Shelby, “A Report on the Teaching Artist Research Project: Teaching Artists and the Future of Education,” NORC at the University of Chicago, 33. 2 Graham Bowley, “Trump Tried to End Federal Arts Funding. Instead, it Grew,” NY Times, January 15, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/arts/trump-arts-nea-funding.html ­ (­accessed S­ eptember 5, 2022). 3 Meg Garcia and Virginia Spivey, “Diversifying the Discipline through AP Art History,” College Art Association Conference, March 5, 2022. 4 For an analysis of this phenomenon in the creation of an Impressionist art historical canon from the perspective of psychology, see James Cutting, “Mere Exposure, Reproduction, and the Impressionist Canon,” in Partisan Canons, ed. Anna Brzyski (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 79–94. 5 Angela Valenzuela, “Insurrection and the Decolonial Imaginary at Academia Cuauhtli: The Liberating Potential of Third-Space Pedagogies in a Third Space,” in Latinx Curriculum Theorizing, ed. Theodorea Regina Berry, Crystal A. Kalinec-Craig, and Mariela A. Rodríguez (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 6. 6 Bettina L. Love, We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2019), 100–101. 7 Sefanit Habtom, “Arts-Based Abolitionist Education: Free Money Example and Sample Curriculum,” in Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators (Chico, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2021), 345. 8 Ananda Cohen-Aponte and Elena Fitzpatrick Sifford, “Dialogues: Addressing Diversity and Inclusion in Latin American and Latinx Art History,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1, no. 3 (2019): 69. 9 Alba Isabel Lamar and Lynette DeAun Guzmán, “Conocimientos Míos: Engaging Possibilities for School Curriculum,” in Latinx Curriculum Theorizing, ed. Theodorea Regina Berry, Crystal A. Kalinec-Craig, and Mariela A. Rodríguez (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 100. 10 Sarah Schwartz, “Map: Where Critical Race Theory Is Under Attack,” Education Week, June 11, 2021,  https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-­attack/ 2021/06 (accessed June 20, 2022). 11 AUC Art Collective, https://aucartcollective.org/ (accessed June 3, 2022). 12 The Black School, https://theblack.school/about-us/ (accessed June 3, 2022). 13 Adriana Zavala, “Latin@ Art at the Intersection,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 40, no. 1 (2015): 127–128. 14 Sara Garzón, “Transhistorical Horizons: Contesting the Colonial Past in Latin American Contemporary Art” (Ph.D Dissertation, Cornell University, 2022). 15 See Ella Maria Diaz and Ananda Cohen-Aponte, “Sandy Rodriguez’s Codex Rodriguez-­ Mondragón,” in Sandy Rodriguez: Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón (Riverside, CA: Riverside Art

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Ananda Cohen-Aponte Museum, 2018), 9–28; Charlene Villaseñor Black, “Art as Reconquista: Sandy Rodriguez and the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón,” in Sandy Rodriguez, Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón (Riverside: Riverside Art Museum, 2018), 3–4; Ananda Cohen-Aponte and Ella Maria Diaz, “Painting Prophecy: Mapping a Polyphonic Chicana Codex Tradition in the Twenty-First Century,” English Language Notes 57, no. 2 (2019): 22–42; and Erika Loic, “The Once and Future Histories of the Book: Decolonial Interventions into the Codex, Chronicle, and Khipu,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 4, no. 1 (2022): 9–26. 16 For a detailed description of the grant as well as the activities and collaborators associated with it, see https://www.migrationcollab.com/ (accessed June 20, 2022). 17 Sandra Styres, “Literacies of Land: Decolonizing Narratives, Storying, and Literature,” in Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View, ed. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang (London: Routledge, 2018), 25. 18 Logan Kistler et al., “Transoceanic Drift and the Domestication of African Bottle Gourds in the Americas,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 8 (2014): 2937. 19 Kistler et al., 2937–2941. 20 Charles B. Heiser, Jr., The Gourd Book (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), 115. 21 Heiser, Jr., 185–186; John M. Schechter, James Blades, and James Holland, “Güiro,” in Grove Music Online, edited by Deane Root, 2001. https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/ omo-9781561592630-e-0000012008 (accessed June 22, 2022). 22 Jessica Hernandez, Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2022), 24–25. 23 Sria Chatterjee et al., “The Arts, Environmental Justice, and the Ecological Crisis,” ­British Art Studies, no. 18 (2020), https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-18/arts-environmentaljustice-ecological-crisis. 24 Sarah Thomas and Natasha Eaton offer a fascinating analysis of the representation of bottle gourds in the paintings of Agostino Brunias, and their utility as both carrier of water and significance vi-a-vis Mami Wata, a water spirit of the transatlantic worlds of West Africa and the Caribbean. See “Swollen Detail, or What a Vessel Might Give: Agostino Brunias and the Visual and Material Culture of Colonial Dominica,” Atlantic Studies 19, no. 1 (2022): 15–20. 25 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 3rd ed., trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York and London: Continuum, 2005).

Selected Bibliography Chatterjee, Sria, Jessica Horton, Ashley Dawson, Pablo Mukherjee, Shadreck Chirikure, Ayesha ­Hameed, and Macarena Gómez-Barris, et al. “The Arts, Environmental Justice, and the Ecological Crisis.” British Art Studies, no. 18 (2020). https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/ issue-18/arts-environmental-justice-ecological-crisis. Cohen-Aponte, Ananda, and Ella Maria Diaz. “Painting Prophecy: Mapping a Polyphonic Chicana Codex Tradition in the Twenty-First Century.” English Language Notes, 57, no. 2 (2019): 22–42. Cohen-Aponte, Ananda, and Elena FitzPatrick Sifford. “Dialogues: Addressing Diversity and Inclusion in Latin American and Latinx Art History.” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 1, no. 3 (2019): 60–71. Garcia, Meg, and Virginia Spivey. “Diversifying the Discipline through AP Art History.” College Art Association Conference, March 5, 2022. Habtom, Sefanit. “Arts-Based Abolitionist Education: Free Money Example and Sample Curriculum.” In Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators, edited by Education for Liberation Network & Critical Resistance Editorial Collective. 345–350 Chico, CA and ­Edinburgh: AK Press, 2021. Lamar, Alba Isabel, and Lynette DeAun Guzmán. “Conocimientos Míos: Engaging Possibilities for School Curriculum.” In Latinx Curriculum Theorizing, edited by Theodorea Regina Berry, Crystal A. Kalinec-Craig and Mariela A. Rodríguez, 99–116. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019. Love, Bettina L. We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2019.

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Pathways to Art History Styres, Sandra. “Literacies of Land: Decolonizing Narratives, Storying, and Literature.” In Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View, edited by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, 24–37. London: Routledge, 2018. Thomas, Sarah, and Natasha Eaton. “Swollen Detail, or What a Vessel Might Give: Agostino Brunias and the Visual and Material Culture of Colonial Dominica.” Atlantic Studies, 19, no. 1 (2022): 1–26. Valenzuela, Angela. “Insurrection and the Decolonial Imaginary at Academia Cuauhtli: The Liberating Potential of Third-Space Pedagogies in a Third Space.” In Latinx Curriculum Theorizing, edited by Theodorea Regina Berry, Crystal A. Kalinec-Craig and Mariela A. Rodríguez, 3–12. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019.

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15 PEDAGOGIES OF PLACE Listening and Learning in the Margins Keg de Souza

Acknowledgements Keg de Souza is an artist of Goan ancestry living on unceded Gadigal land and holds a PhD from the Wominjeka Djeembana Research Lab at Monash Art, Design and Architecture, Monash University. Keg would like to thank Dr. James Oliver, Dr. Brian Martin and N’arweet Dr. Carolyn Briggs for their continued care and guidance.

Acknowledgement of Country I acknowledge and pay my respects to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and all Traditional Custodians, on whose land and waters I live, work and travel through. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, their culture and continued connection to land and community. Sovereignty was never ceded.

Introduction I am an artist of Goan origin; my own ancestral lands were colonized by the Portuguese, who invaded in 1510 and remained in power until the Indian Army intervened and annexed Goa in 1961, over 450 years later. I live and work on unceded Gadigal land, in the place known by its colonial name of Sydney. My artistic practice over the last two decades has explored the politics of space, opening up an understanding of my personal experiences of colonization including living as a settler on other people’s ancestral lands, and an in-depth exploration of the neighbourhood – the Aboriginal land – I presently live on. The importance of locating and positioning myself has been part of this learning. My politics of knowledge has clearly been shaped by my experiences of how listening and learning occur. Questions such as, “Who?” is given the opportunity to speak, under what conditions and on behalf of whom have been centred in this process.1 Growing up in the Australian suburbs and attending public/state school as the only child of color in class, I often knew the answers but would never raise my hand, not wanting to draw attention to myself out of fear of being bullied. My report cards reflected this; my written work and test scores were

DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-19 218

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Figure 15.1 The Redfern School of Displacement, 2016.  Installation view at Vine Street, Redfern. Courtesy the artist. Created for the 20th Biennale of Sydney. Photograph: Document Photography.

high whilst my class participation ones were low. These early experiences were formative in teaching me whose voices were dominant in spaces of learning and these experiences have continued to shape my work. Through my artistic practice, I create spaces that reorientate learning experiences and processes to center voices from the margins. This chapter discusses a decolonial approach to radical pedagogy with a focus on storytelling through lived experience, Deep Listening and centring the margins to learn about Place with a focus on my work, Redfern School of Displacement (2016) (Figure 15.1).

Knowledge The way I am using the term “radical pedagogy” aligns with bell hooks’s intersectional approach, as “the mutually illuminating interplay of anticolonial, critical and feminist pedagogies,” which acknowledges that historically the scholarly space for radical pedagogies is held by whiteness.2 In order to relearn knowledges that have been subjugated by colonization and racial capitalism we need to begin by asking how we can decenter racial privilege to lead to transformative social change, as Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln “understands with Paulo Freire and Antonio Faundez that Indigenous knowledge is a rich social resource for any justice related attempt to bring about social change.”3 Foregrounding a consideration of a multiplicity of beliefs, histories and ideas embedded in lived experience allows a deep investigation into the role that the production, hierarchies and institutions of knowledge play in decolonization and social transformation.4

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Kombumerri scholar Mary Graham reminds us of the importance of locating knowledge to understand the context they were developed in. Western knowledge systems are often centered, but they should be treated as one amongst many, and that every system, “whatever its epistemology, methodology, logic, cognitive structure or socioeconomic context, originated in a particular locality.”5 Relationality is central in Indigenous epistemology – within an Indigenous worldview everything, including knowledge, is connected through a system of relationality and all things have agency.6 To understand whose knowledge, and what type of knowledge is prioritized, we need to recognize there are multiple knowledge systems, locate that knowledge, and from here actively propose alternatives to dominant Western forms to open up learning that is embedded in reciprocity, community and lived experience. Before discussing the role of knowledge exchange in my own work the Redfern School of Displacement, it is important to acknowledge that since the 2000s there has been a growing interest in where art and education intersect that has come to be known as the “educational turn.” While appreciating that my work does sit in a lineage of artist-run schools and pedagogical projects – such as Tania Brugera’s Useful Art Association and Pablo Helguera’s transpedagogical projects and writing – I want to center decolonial thinking in my discussion through Indigenous methodologies such as Deep Listening and storytelling, over the meeting of art and education.

Redfern I capitalize “Place” in my writing to align it with Graham’s definition of Place being a living thing not bound to a physical location, but cultural, social and spiritual – one based on experience, community and without fixity to time or space.7 To discuss listening and learning in pedagogies of Place through my work Redfern School of Displacement, it is necessary to give context to the complex and contested area in which the work was located. Redfern, the neighborhood in which I live, sits on unceded Gadigal land in inner-city Sydney. I also want to acknowledge that as a non-Indigenous person to this Country I write from the position of an outsider and I am unable to describe the deep loss that First Nations people have experienced and continue to experience since the invasion of this country. In 1835, Great Britain proclaimed Australia terra nullius meaning, ‘nobody’s land’ – this fictional classification was only dismissed in 1992 during the Mabo Land Rights Case after decades of activism led by Mer man, Eddie Koiki Mabo. Land is the key link in connection of Country for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (as well as Indigenous peoples around the world) through the interrelated relations of culture, spirituality, family, law, lore, language and identity. Land is central in the ongoing resistance to colonization that continues today. Displacement and dispossession related to land continues to be at the center of many of the key political moments in Redfern. The area’s working-class community grew from the factories and the Eveleigh railyards that opened in the late 1800s. Large social housing apartment blocks were built from 1949 until the 1970s and still house many of the area’s residents. During the early 1970s, Redfern was home to the largest Aboriginal community in Australia, around 25,000 Aboriginal residents, many who had been forced off their lands and came to work in the factories and railyards.8 Gumbainggir activist, actor and academic Gary Foley has written extensively about the significance of Redfern in the Black Power Movement in Australia, in which he was a central figure.9 This self-determination movement led to the formation of many of the first Aboriginal-run organizations in the country, 220

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directly addressing needs of the local Aboriginal community. This included the Redfern Aboriginal Legal Service, set up in response to the targeted and racist policing of the local Aboriginal community; Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service, to provide free health care and the Aboriginal Housing Company (AHC), which advocated for affordable homes in Redfern for local Aboriginal residents.10 The Block, a piece of land across from Redfern Train Station, is probably the most wellknown location in the area and has been described as the ‘Black heart of Redfern’ due to its significance as a meeting place for the Aboriginal community. In 1972, the AHC secured a government grant, to purchase the Block and build affordable Aboriginal housing on this land. By the 1990s, the AHC was headed by Mick Mundine who organized the demolition of a number of these houses, citing that they had fallen into disrepair. Skip forward to 2005, followed by increased gentrification of the inner-city suburbs driven by the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, the Redfern-Waterloo Authority (RWA) had been established. The government determined the area to be “state-significant” and gave the RWA special powers, including overriding heritage legislation to push through rapid gentrification. This continued the systematic displacement of the area’s low income and Aboriginal residents to outer Sydney suburbs. By 2015, at the time I was developing the Redfern School of Displacement, the remaining housing on the Block had been cleared and the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy, led by Wiradjuri Elder Jenny Munro had been set up to protest the new high-density commercial development approved for the land. The AHC’s plan was to wait for revenue from this development to later build Aboriginal housing on the site, the community supporting the Tent Embassy feared this would never happen. In February 2015, the AHC issued an eviction notice to the inhabitants of the Tent Embassy, the protestors refused to leave and eventually claimed victory when the federal government committed to 70 million dollars towards 62 homes for Aboriginal people. These dwellings were not the original low-density housing ­vision for the Block, but a small number in the large development. At this time a high-rise re-zoning of the area had just been approved, marking Redfern’s next stage of gentrification.

Positioning the School of Displacement This conjuncture of events made the timing right to come together, learn from the past impacts of displacement and think through the future of the area. It is here I should mention that I already had a history creating projects in Redfern, including the Redfern/Waterloo: Tour of Beauty, as a member of SquatSpace collective. This project took “tourists” to key sites around the neighborhood on a bus and bicycles to meet with local stakeholders and discuss impacts of the recent and ongoing gentrification. The Tour ran from 2005 to 2010, and again in 2016 (as a series of tours as part of the School), these were run in conjunction with various exhibitions and conferences. Another project I co-curated, There Goes the Neighbourhood, explored gentrification in Redfern not as a unique phenomenon but one with global parallels. This invited seven local artists and seven international artists to explore this theme through a large-scale, multi-venue exhibition and publishing project. The exhibition was held at Carriageworks, the then new multi-million-dollar arts venue, site of the former railyards and location of the 1918 General Strike for a shorter working week. This development was key in the gentrification of the area and staging the exhibition here highlighted the imbrication of the arts in this process. My work in the area cumulatively built my own learning of Place through recognizing histories of the location as well 221

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as acknowledging and building relationships with people from my local community over a long period of time. The Redfern School of Displacement was an experiment in pedagogical exchanges; it foregrounded the importance of being situated within and learning directly from Place to understand the complex histories and local issues of the area. The School was developed for the 20th Biennale of Sydney: The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed, the sessions running from March to May 2016.11 As the largest contemporary visual arts event in the country, the Biennale brings its own structures of support – including cultural capital – to the works that are presented as part of it. Considering this, the positioning of the School outside of the main cultural venues, in one of the Biennale’s “in-between” spaces located in the Redfern community was critically important. The School was held inside a warehouse at 16 Vine Street, Redfern; the entrance looked out over the Block; this positioning embedded the learning directly in the community.

Temporary Architecture The temporary architecture of the School itself was also key to the project. I am interested in how creating and presenting architecture outside the profession can allow it to be driven conceptually by issues of social and spatial justice and removed from usual utilitarian parameters of functionality, such as shelter. I use the term “temporary architecture” to describe the architecture I make, consisting of a particular form of hand-made, light-weight, portable and often textile-based forms. These are usually cheap, recycled and/or easily obtainable materials, attempting to reflect the intentions of the spaces and dialogues I want to create within, being democratic and accessible. The impermanent nature is conceptually significant, these forms do not claim ownership of the land. Architecture is often monumental, literally occupying land, embodying and producing colonization. The intention of my structures is for the architecture to focus on its role as a frame for intersectional, decolonial dialogues about Place. Along with the Tent Embassy, at the time I was developing the School there was a large tent city that had been set up in the park across from Sydney’s Central Station and the news reports were filled with images of the Syrian refugee crisis of masses of people fleeing their lands, many living in tent camps. The symbol of the tent became a metaphor for displacement in the work. From the street, the School was entered through a large relief tent, the type used in UN refugee camps, this long tunnel entry opened up to a large space that was constructed out of numerous colourful tents patchworked together to form a large, unified structure. Along the structure’s base where this main canopy reached the floor a number of small tents met the edge, enclosing the structure and forming a series of smaller periphery tent spaces that faced inward. These could be crawled through to enter the large warehouse space and look back onto the structure. Inside the giant tent, plastic plaid laundry bags formed seating randomly around the space. The architecture was designed as a democratic framing device that would resonate with the intention of the pedagogy housed inside, manifesting in the structure’s materiality – being handmade out of readily available tents, salvaged from the street and purchased from second-hand stores. The colorful structure made it clear that this was no conventional school. The materiality and design details, including the lack of the front of the “classroom,” the moveable seating and the soft, unconventional temporary architecture were all used with the intention of breaking down common perceptions of and hierarchies in educational institutions. 222

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Stories A focus of the School was to question what type, and whose knowledges were being prioritized in the space. People with particular local knowledge and lived experiences of displacement and dispossession, related to the topic of each session, were specifically invited to share their stories, highlighting local voices. The School had no designated teachers, only these “invited participants” from the community. This tactic brought awareness to how knowledge based in experience shapes what we value and in turn how we know what we know, and how we use it.12 Drawing from radical pedagogues such as hooks, Friere and Giroux and acknowledging that particular limitations are in place when learning through formal educational institutions, the School sought to create a space that would welcome and highlight the knowledge of marginalized people through their stories. In order to reach a local audience, these intentions were outlined through a printed flier – in addition to the Biennale promotional materials – that was circulated amongst the community. In traditional learning environments, there is often a pre-determined hierarchy that involves teachers standing at the front of the room and teaching while students sit in rows and learn. As the School had no natural front, when people entered the space they naturally repositioned the plaid bags in a circular-like shape, the invited participants were dotted around the space in an attempt to democratize the space, with the hope people would feel more comfortable in joining the conversations due to the informal nature of the setting. The reality was that through most of the School sessions the conversation was dominated by the invited participants. Whilst this was not the initial intention, on reflection this was more effective in creating space for the invited participants to tell their stories without interruption, though not closing off the discussion to other people in the space. As the flier stated, “Marginalised voices that are often displaced from mainstream dialogue are at the centre of the Redfern School of Displacement,” encouraging people to acknowledge their own privileges before speaking. In an engaged pedagogy, while every person may have a valuable contribution to make, it “does not assume that all voices should be heard all the time or that all voices should occupy the same amount of time.”13 Often undervalued in Western educational experiences, the importance of stories are described here through an Indigenous perspective: We argue that for Indigenous people stories and storytelling is an integral element in people’s lives. Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people use storying and yarning in everyday interactions with others; it is the way we make sense of our lived experience.14 The School created a space where the importance of sharing stories from people’s lived experience of displacement were naturally centred. In the session Forced Migration and the Future, 96-year-old Bigambul Elder Uncle Wes Marne, who comes from a long line of storytellers, shared that when he was nine years old, the government walked him off his Country to Deadbird Mission; this displacement continued throughout his life including growing up with segregation at school and an enforced curfew. Uncle Wes addressed the group of Sudanese children from refugee backgrounds, who were invited participants at this session and paralleled his own experience of displacement to their own and told them they were now responsible for caring for Country here. This highlighted the importance of listening and relating to the children’s stories by centering, relating and valuing them in the process of learning. 223

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In the Housing and Homelessness session one of the “invited participants,” Ross Smith, a public housing activist and resident of the local public housing towers, spoke of his lived experience of the community of care between the residents, as well as the anxiety caused by the impending evictions they were facing. Ross shared the story of “the jury,” a group of elderly residents who sat in a communal area at the base of the towers keeping tabs and gossip on everyone. The importance of this group in the housing community was highlighted in Ross’s story when he explained that if someone didn’t come down at their usual time the jury would be the first ones to notice and someone would be sent to check on them. This informal role highlighted the importance of community care, where the elderly residents had created their own support system and the realization that this would be dissolved when they were evicted and rehoused in various locations. The government body in charge of managing public housing has a history of relocating people to remote suburbs and many of the residents were aware they would likely be housed far away from the community they had built. Personal stories such as this are not often given space to be shared publicly and the importance of these local struggles was centred in this space for learning. As an experimental pedagogical space, the School shifted Western knowledge hierarchies by valuing the stories shared from the local community and through this formed a space for decolonial learning. Relationships between people are shaped by those stories that communities engage in, bringing meaning to their own experiences and these personal stories from the local Redfern community were grounded in Place and told of displacement and dispossession through the themes of the School.15 As Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie highlight, colonization is not historical – it is an ongoing process through land and property, as well as how we address spatial and physical aspects in relation to the social, “but also more deeply with how places and our orientations to them are informed by, and determinants of, history, empire, and culture.”16 This reminds us that Place is multiple, flexible and layered and embraces not only a human element but also a spiritual one.17 In the School, the invited participants’ personal stories are often related to land and Place.

Deep Listening The School created a space for reflexivity, and the act of listening became political through encouraging people to acknowledge and evaluate their various social and cultural privileges. The demographic of the majority of attendees at the sessions, many of whom came through the inbuilt Biennale audience, were white and middle class. Decentering these voices, which are commonly the dominant ones, emphasized the value of the participants’ knowledge in this place-based learning and encouraged the school’s attendees to engage in active and Deep Listening. Listening is addressed in Paulo Freire’s pedagogical model through the emphasis on the teacher to redistribute the power balance by taking on the role of listening and encouraging students to engage in critical listening, encouraging them to be active in knowledge creation.18 In an attempt to move beyond these ideas, as they tend to create unhelpful and polarizing binaries of dialogue being “active” and listening being “passive,” the School instead drew from the Indigenous concept of Deep Listening, which describes a way of learning and togetherness as a way to build community and reciprocity, by giving space for the invited participants to speak and share their stories without being interrupted.19

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Deep Listening is central to Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing and many different Aboriginal language groups have words for the concept including Dadirri in Ngangikurungkurr language; Gulpa Ngawal in Yorta Yorta language; for Gunai/Kurnai people it is Molla Wariga; and in Bundjalung language it is Gan’na. Describing the importance of Deep Listening (dadirri), Ngan’gikurunggurr Elder Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann states: What I want to talk about is another special quality of my people. I believe it is the most important. It is our most unique gift. It is perhaps the greatest gift we can give to our fellow Australians. In our language this quality is called dadirri. It is inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness. Dadirri recognises the deep spring that is inside us. We call on it and it calls to us. This is the gift that Australia is thirsting for. It is something like what you call “contemplation”. When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again.20 The act of Deep Listening builds relationality, reciprocity and community by bringing attention to the stories being heard. Jiman/Bundjalung researcher Judy Atkinson emphasizes the importance of developing the relationships, getting the story right, and listening respectfully. Deep Listening also means observing and listening to oneself.21 Building relationships and relationality aided by Deep Listening emphasizes the need for interconnectedness in learning and community building.

Margins As previously outlined, the School aimed to highlight voices of marginalized people who have experienced displacement including: Indigenous people, people of color and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds as “invited participants.” By centering these voices, the School intended to build decolonial dialogue, strength and community between people in the margins, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith reminds us: [To not] retrench to the margins, retrieve what we were and remake ourselves. The past, our stories local and global, the present, our communities, cultures, languages and social practices – all may be spaces of marginalization, but they have also become spaces of resistance and hope.22 hooks too reminds us of the strength of the margins as a site of radical possibility and space of resistance.23 The School drew inspiration from Tuhiwai Smith and hooks, who both reference the margins as becoming a place of power bringing resistance and hope to those with lived experience of being positioned here, by bringing these voices into conversation with each other and placing them in the centre. It is from the margins, as a person of color whose ancestral lands were colonized I create spaces for pedagogy in my own practice to offer possibilities of a radical perspective and to create and imagine new worlds. Using the opportunity to experiment with building a learning space outside of a Western educational environment, the School was an exploration of using a marginalized position to build a decolonial pedagogy, to not only prioritize those knowledges that have been oppressed by colonization but also as a space to create new knowledge, celebrate, speculate and organize through coming together and building community – in other words bringing resistance to power.

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Conclusion The Redfern School of Displacement took its lead from radical pedagogues and decolonial methodologies, focussing on how a pedagogical process occurs – who is given opportunities to speak, learn and whose knowledge is prioritized in a process of actively decentering a Western educational system. Using temporary architecture to frame and highlight voices from the margins through storytelling, the work centered the act of Deep Listening – who we listen to as well as how we listen. Thoughtful and engaged listening were valued and respected as part of the decentering of dominant voices; knowing the importance of when to speak and when to listen were part of the learnings for participants. Through this process of listening and learning the Redfern School of Displacement drew from Indigenous ways of thinking, being and doing to build relationality, relationships and community towards an active and engaged pedagogy of Place.

Notes 1 For more on this, see Henri Giroux, Living Dangerously: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference (New York: Peter Lang, 1993). 2 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York and ­London: Routledge, 1994), 9. 3 Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds), “Introduction: Critical Methodologies and ­Indigenous Inquiry,” in Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014), 2. 4 For more on this, see Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed. (London; New York: Zed Books: Distributed in the USA Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 5 Mary Graham, “Understanding Human Agency in Terms of Place: A Proposed Aboriginal ­Research Methodology,” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, 6: 71 (2009): 75. 6 See Brian Martin, “Methodology Is Content: Indigenous Approaches to Research and Knowledge,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 49: 14 (2017): 1392–1400. 7 Mary Graham, “Understanding Human Agency in Terms of Place: A Proposed Aboriginal ­Research Methodology,” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 6 (2009): 75. 8 Gary Foley, “Black Power in Redfern, 1968–1972,” in There Goes the Neighbourhood: Redfern and the Politics of Urban Space, ed. Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg (Sydney: Breakout Web Print, 2009), 12–21. 9 Ibid. 10 Gary Foley, “A Short History of the Australian Indigenous Resistance 1950 – 1990,” on Kooriweb website, http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/resources/pdfs/229.pdf, accessed 22 June, 2021. 11 The 20th Biennale of Sydney: The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. ­Artistic D ­ irector was Dr Stephanie Rosenthal. For more see https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/ archive/20th-biennale-of-sydney/, Accessed 20 June, 2021. 12 See bell hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom (New York and London: Routledge, 2010). 13 Ibid., 21. 14 Lynore Geia, Barbara Hayes and Kim Usher, “Narrative or Yarning/Aboriginal Storytelling: ­Towards an Understanding of an Indigenous Perspective and Its Implications for Research Practice,” Contemporary Nurse: A Journal for the Australian Nursing Profession 46, no. 1 (2013): 16. 15 See Mary Graham, “Understanding Human Agency in Terms of Place: A Proposed Aboriginal Research Methodology,” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 6 (2009): 71–78. 16 Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie, Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1. 17 Graham, 2006. 18 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Bloomsbury, 2000), 81.

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Pedagogies of Place: Listening and Learning in the Margins 19 See Laura Brearley, “Deep Listening and Leadership: An Indigenous Model of Leadership and Community Development in Australia,” in Restorying Indigenous Leadership: Wise Practices in Community Development, edited by Cora Voyageur, Laura Brearley and Brian Calliou (Canada: Banff Centre Press, 2015). 20 Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, “Dadirri -- Inner Deep Listening and Quiet Still Awareness -A Reflection by Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann,” (1998) on Miriam Rose Foundation website. https://www.miriamrosefoundation.org.au/dadirri/, accessed July 8, 2021. 21 For more on Deep Listening see Judy Atkinson, “Privileging Indigenous Research Methodologies,” paper presented at the National Indigenous Researchers Forum, University of Melbourne. 2001. 22 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London; New York: Zed Books: Distributed in the USA Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 4. 23 bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin As a Space of Radical Openness,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36 (1989): 15–23.

Selected Bibliography Atkinson, Judy. “Privileging Indigenous Research Methodologies.” Paper presented at the National Indigenous Researchers Forum, University of Melbourne, 2001. Brearley, Laura. “Deep Listening and Leadership: An Indigenous Model of Leadership and Community Development in Australia.” In Restoryin Indigenous Leadership: Wise Practices in Community Development, edited by Cora Voyageur, Laura Brearley and Brian Calliou, Canada: Banff Centre Press, 2015. Denzin, Norman K. and Lincoln, Yvonna S. (eds) “Introduction: Critical Methodologies and Indigenous Inquiry.” In Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014. Foley, Gary. “Black Power in Redfern, 1968–1972.” In There Goes the Neighbourhood: Redfern and the Politics of Urban Space, edited by Keg De Souza, et al. Sydney: Breakout Web Print, 2009. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Bloomsbury, 2000. Geia, Lynore, Barbara Hayes and Kim Usher. “Narrative or Yarning/Aboriginal Storytelling: Towards an Understanding of an Indigenous Perspective and Its Implications for Research Practice.” Contemporary Nurse: A Journal for the Australian Nursing Profession 46, no. 1 (2013): 13–17. Giroux, Henri. Living Dangerously: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Graham, Mary. “Understanding Human Agency in Terms of Place: A Proposed Aboriginal Research Methodology.” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, no. 6 (2009): 71–78. hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margin As a Space of Radical Openness.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36 (1989): 15–23. hooks, bell. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York and London: Routledge, 2010. Martin, Brian. “Methodology Is Content: Indigenous Approaches to Research and Knowledge.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 49, no.14 (2017): 1392–1400. https://doi.org/10.1080/0013185 7.2017.1298034 Tuck, Eve et al. Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods. New York: Routledge, 2014. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed. ­London; New York: Zed Books: Distributed in the USA Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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16 THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF ADJUNCTING ART HISTORY Claire Raymond

The land where I write this chapter is the unceded territory of the Wabanaki, that is, the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, and Micmac peoples. I am grateful to the Wabanaki for the support and sustenance that this land gives me, inhabiting it as I do as an interloper. The early decades of the twenty-first century in academia are the era of the “precariat,” liminal professors with PhDs from high-ranking universities who labor as contingent faculty at below minimum wage in unstable positions.1 To unpack an intersection of gender, race, and economic class in contingent labor, I revivify French feminist theorist ­Christine Delphy’s materialist feminist interrogation of economic class and gender.2 ­Developing from Delphy, I argue that traditional structures of heterosexist marriage are, in the twenty-first century, uncannily repeated in the realm of adjunct teaching of art history, positions disproportionately staffed by women.3 Extrapolating from Delphy’s structuralist concept of gender as the “principle of partition,” I pressure Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that aesthetic values are class values, illuminating the double, uncanny, and ultimately punitive class position of women laboring in art history often subsisting near or below the poverty line as part of academia’s precariat.4 The principle of partition as Delphy creates the term describes the way that the division woman or man is the fundamental act of division of Western power structures. Delphy, in this insight first made nearly 40 years ago, lays out an approach to de-essentializing gender through materialist analysis.5 Drawing from ­Delphy’s contention that woman in traditional heteropatriarchy is the name given to a group of people who share a hidden economic class, I point to ways that adjuncts occupy a permutation of economic class, pulled into eddies of dispossession that are stable precisely because of their insidious invisibility.6 Revising sexist capitalist structures is necessary for the work of decolonization because coloniality is profoundly entwined with capitalism. While all genders and races labor as academia’s contingent faculty, women (cis and trans) adjuncts teaching art history occupy an especially eerie role, purveyors of class-inflected knowledge whose economic compensation for their work often places them in poverty.7 Interrogating how art history taught in the university intersects with the moneyed artworld, I contend that decolonizing the art history classroom must include substantive dismantling of academia’s corporatization.8 In the corporate university, adjuncting-while-feminine is DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-20 228

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an enfolded or hidden economic class, analogous to that of married-while-woman in the mid-twentieth century. Within adjunct exploitation, teaching art history stands out for irony in that the fine art milieu, more so than other sectors of the humanities in academia, has deep and prevalent ties to big money. The goal of this chapter is to make explicit this irony: that many who are teaching art history – this intellectual structure buttressed by big money – are themselves impoverished. Through interpellation of personal experience in my discussion of Delphy’s unjustly overlooked writings and Tina M. Campt’s theory of refusal, this chapter retraces a discussion from a seminar that I taught at a university in the American southeast in the latter half of the second decade of the twenty-first century. The seminar was stipulated by the department for which I taught to cover “photography and culture,” a vague designation to be sure. I focused the class that semester on the concept of photography as resistance to disappearance. In this class, we viewed Aboriginal Australian artist Tracey Moffatt’s Laudanum, a series of 19 photogravures that highlights class struggle, racism, economic oppression, and the violence of colonization.9 The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia describes the series’ critique of colonization: [In this] series of 19 photogravures … shot in a colonial mansion, Moffatt conjures a hallucinatory narrative of sexual violence between a White mistress and her Asian maid, filtered through what seems to be a drug-fuelled haze … By adopting the style of early photography and setting this drama within the confines of a Victorian mansion, Moffatt suggests a depravity underlying the bourgeois respectability and gentility.10 Photogravure, an intaglio printing method that involves etching a copper plate from which the final photographic image is printed, was developed in the nineteenth century. ­Laudanum refers to an admixture of opium and alcohol commonly used in the nineteenth century. Moffatt’s work, then, comments on the long reach of this century of colonization. Sparks around race, gender, and class set off, on a meta-level, in my class discussion of Moffatt’s Laudanum shape this chapter.

Feminism’s Unfinished Work Definitively, contingent labor in the academy, like being gendered feminine in traditional heterosexist marriage, is marked by material oppression. Inadequate financial compensation is definitive for adjunct faculty; paid as adjuncts, exploitation is definitional.11 The unfinished work of feminism opens a painful cleavage for adjuncts teaching art history. The constraint of poor financial compensation coupled with chronic job insecurity creates a system of class oppression within the academy, regardless of the hypothetical possibility of some individual adjuncts’ resources outside the academy.12 Adjunct laborers have scant voice in the university, lacking even the pretense of academic freedom offered to tenured faculty. In the field of art history, deviation from the prescribed script of proffering access to art’s cultural capital could cause loss of contingent employment. Ciswomen and transwomen teaching as adjuncts, structurally prevented from revealing to students the low pay and lack of agency and authority inherent to adjuncting, are returned to retrograde atavistic codes of femininity before feminism.13 Our teaching becomes a performance of suppressed pain, eerily echoing the gendered privations of voice and agency that Delphy investigated some half a century ago in the context of marriage. As in traditional heterosexist marriage, 229

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the patriarchal structure of capitalism in academia strips feminine adjuncts of voice, agency, and pay, reinstating within the academy traditional strictures of gender. Universities suppress public knowledge of the extreme gap between what adjunct ­laborers offer to students – access to cultural capital and hence class maintenance or aspiration – and how adjuncts are paid – less than the minimum wage for hours of labor teaching in the classroom, researching and writing lectures, grading papers, meeting with students, and maintaining a social presence within departments that negate us. College recruitment and publicity materials present façades of educational leadership not indicating that within their boundaries adjuncts labor for pay so low as to be nearly nonremunerative. The compact of adjunct labor in the twenty-first century is like that of heterosexist marriage in the early to mid-twentieth century, when Delphy exposed how middle- and upper-class wives were proffered a space of surface social prestige in exchange for accepting subservient, disenfranchised roles within the marriage; Delphy contends that, in themselves, these women were economically proletariat inasmuch as their income primarily or wholly stemmed from male family members.14 So also, adjuncting art history one accepts the imprimatur to perform in the role of one who has cultural capital, knowledge of art, while accepting the material role of one radically disempowered within that system. One becomes a “wife” within the academy. Not the wife of a professor but instead “professor-as-wife.” The apparatus of the twenty-first century university in the United States is thoroughly encroached by and reflective of capitalist structures. And yet even within this larger frame of exploitation, art history forms a private, unexposed eddy of exploitation, hidden within codes of class-based taste that shape the theft of labor that is adjunct employment. This situation replicates Delphy’s argument that marriage constitutes a specific form of caste exploitation coexisting within but different from capitalist exploitation outside marriage. Like a traditional heterosexist marriage, adjunct teaching of art history is an eddy of exploitation. While heterosexist marriage still exists in the West, it has become more egalitarian, but adjunctcy steps in to reassert a structure in which feminine labor is taken without fair compensation for the years of training and the many hours of skilled labor required for teaching college-level art history.15

Initiations Capitalist structures of power not only haunt but create, control, and maintain the artworld.16 Inasmuch as knowledge of the fine arts stands for cultural capital, adjuncts teaching art history curricula present initiatory access to bourgeois cultural treasures – the word treasure here used as Philip J. Deloria defines the term, spoils of war, products of colonialist violence.17 While offering connection to this tainted cultural capital to students, adjuncts are paid less than a living wage. In the classroom, the adjunct represents the perspective of what Bourdieu defines as taste, class privilege reified as knowledge of fine art, without revealing that she is herself impoverished financially. This double structure of obfuscation around the terms of dispossession and denial of agency repeats Delphy’s insight into the problematic of marriage.18 Feminine labor appropriated and exploited here is a hidden eddy of exploitation within broader systems of capitalist exploitation of the proletariat. In adjuncting art history, feminine labor is exploited through a structure in which the secret of the adjunct’s lack of economic agency, her lack of fair compensation, is obfuscated behind the screen of cultural capital that is the fine arts industry. 230

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I saw this conjunction come sharply into view when teaching at a university in the southeastern United States that had experienced controversial national scrutiny for its rape culture.19 Art history majors here were, jokingly and not without misogyny, called “girls in pearls,” sorority girls who dated fraternity brothers in the context of ferocious campus rape statistics, and studied art history as part of a curriculum promulgating feminine bourgeois style, a path to becoming or to holding onto the space of cultural capital afforded those families who own the means of the production of capital.20 The uncanny marriage plot of being a woman adjunct teaching art history in this context intensified in a classroom context in which I began to teach photographic works of Indigenous women. I focused on photography by Indigenous American women, activist artists like Rebecca Belmore, Wendy Red Star, and Matika Wilbur, works that fight for voice in oppressive cultural contexts of the United States and Canada, artworks with a subtlety that allows them to find audience in our political situation where Indigenous rights have yet to be reckoned.21 The forceful political acts that are Belmore’s, Red Star’s, and Wilbur’s oeuvres are expressed through beautiful images that do not overtly suggest militant resistance. Belmore’s emotionally intense pieces often read to students as statements about the artist’s embodied suffering rather than as direct threats to systems that harm Indigenous women. In the classroom, students responded enthusiastically to these artists’ works. When, however, I taught the series by Tracey Moffatt (the Indigenous Australian filmmaker and multimedia artist) titled Laudanum, in which histories of servitude, enslavement, genocidal violence, and gender are exposed, student discomfort was pronounced.22 Suddenly the foundation of our academic familial milieu was laid bare, causing notable student anxiety. Laid bare in Moffatt’s Laudanum was a kind of parable of my role as the feminine professor-as-wife (not wife of a professor but rather the professor whose social role is structurally wife) and the role of the young women in the class, acolytes entering the cultural capital of fine art. Being an adjunct, my presence in the classroom was predicated on a coverture-payment rather than a fair price for my decades of study, numerous publications, and intellectual labor. Teaching about power structures, I had no power. The images of Laudanum work through painful revelations of feminine dispossession, as the white land-owning mistress, addicted to drugs, is trapped in the house while the Pacific Islander servant is even more radically without options, economic, and personal.23 This nightmare of the feminine (drawing the term from Abigail Solomon-Godeau), in my classroom, intersected with what Tina Campt identifies as a performative “practice of refusal.”24 In this class group predominated by ciswomen (who were White, Asian, and light-skinned Latinx), an African American cisman cried out of Moffatt’s Laudanum “This is not art!”25 In his practice of refusal, this student voiced an interpretive gap between Moffatt’s work Laudanum and our classroom context. In my role as purveyor (to those students learning taste from me) of the gleam of an economic class from which I, by dint of the hidden marriage of adjuncting, was excluded, I was defenseless. How could I argue to this young man that what so discomfited us in Moffatt’s work is what makes it “art” when our presence in that classroom was predicated on our mutually ignoring the financial structures that held us there financial structures exposed in Moffatt’s work? In a group of “girls in pearls,” this cisgendered male student felt emboldened to give voice to the discomfort of seeing Moffatt’s challenging images that contend with coloniality, race, servitude, and the feminine nightmare of class. As an adjunct inhabiting my own nightmare of the feminine, I had no real answer for him. I had an intellectual answer but not one that I could support with praxis, given my acquiescence to unacceptable terms of 231

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academic wifedom – in the sense that adjuncting is the economic equivalent of marriage – being labor so poorly remunerated as to be only a symbolic fee, a wife’s gift. He was right. In the specific context of our classroom, Laudanum was not art because we did not have the vantage to view it as such. Our vantage suppressed the knowledge Moffatt offers. Our mutual survival, at this university in the southeastern United States, depended on this suppression. In Moffatt’s Laudanum with its nightmare swirl of female powerlessness and racist abuse, with a drug-addled White woman tormenting a young Pacific Islander woman who for economic reasons cannot escape her, the drugged haze of the White woman’s life is itself the product of gendered oppressions, mirroring back all too closely the multiple layers of subterfuge of academia’s adjunct marriage. Why did I bring Moffatt’s work to the class that day? Laudanum was distressing for us to see, revealing a history of multiple oppressions within the capitalist push of settler colonialism. Moffatt’s work reveals what I’ve defined, earlier in this chapter, as a hidden eddy of capitalism, the type of structure Delphy clarified in its relationship to and difference from broader structures of capitalist exploitation. In Campt’s suggestion of a politics of refusal, we perhaps see some outlet from this circle of regressive politics that has taken hold in the academy. The young man in my classroom was voicing a politics of refusal. What was needed was for me to voice refusal on a broader scale, creating a vantage from which students could clearly see Moffatt’s searing work. The next week, the class moved on to other artists, without resolving the question of whether Moffatt’s Laudanum is art. Is art what covers the wound of class dispossession? 26 Or is it a force that reveals that very structure? When we teach art, which side do we want our students to see? In the secret eddy of adjuncting art history, a kind of laudanum-effect takes hold. One must numb oneself to continue to teach within the coverture of this system. If survival in academia entails staying within an entrenched system of patriarchal capitalist power, how to practice a politics of refusal and also remain employed? The experience of teaching as contingent faculty is not a rarity but the majority experience of feminine people laboring now in academia. In the context of teaching art history, the poverty of those who adjunct is polished over by wealth’s control of the artworld.27 If refusal is an act that will usher an adjunct into unemployment, removal from even the fringe of academia, refusal to acquiesce to the artworld’s obeisance to big money means being silenced by dint of being removed from academia. But not practicing the politics of refusal is also acquiescence to silence, agreeing to one’s own scholarly erasure in the very space of acting as a professor. Crucial to decolonizing art history, then, is to eloquently reveal art history in academia as a site of economic contestation.

Outsider Art Adjunct instructors, the workhorses of the capitalist art history industry, are implicit outsiders. Despite our tenuous value, signified by our low monetary status within the university system, we ironically teach about art works considered highly valuable by the capitalist machinery of canonicity that dictates the contours of art history curricula. In my case, teaching about photography and film created by Indigenous women was permitted, early on, because it flew under the radar as feminist, a niche that liberal ideology feels compelled to permit in token ways. More recently, the field of Indigenous studies has become trendy. Indigenous women’s art works are not immune to the capitalist machinery of the artworld. Even as Indigenous American traditions and traditional beliefs stand antithetically to the 232

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core concept of capitalism – to use up resources indiscriminately in an endless effort to produce capital – within the artworld now there is no real egress, no off-ramp from the imprimatur to sell work into the prestige industry.28 Teaching Indigenous American photography for a different state university, this time in the northeastern United States, more recently I brought into discussion a new resource that sees its role as injecting the market with Indigenous art, a place called the Forge Project founded by the ultra-wealthy, non-Indigenous, Gochman family.29 Mutatis mutandis, as Reetta Humalajoki argues in Consumption as Assimilation, we see that the capacity of settler colonist culture to absorb Indigenous works under the guise of celebrating Indigenous culture continues in the 2020s.30 Here, I do not critique those who work for or contribute work to the Forge Project. Instead, I note the continuing settler colonialist habit of fascinated acquisition which the Gochmans practice, at once valorizing Indigenous art while also encapsulating it within control of settler money and power. How might an adjunct, teaching contemporary art history and struggling to hold onto a position within the academy, angle a critique of the glistening surface positionality of a place like the Forge Project? In contrast to my experience teaching at the university in the southeastern United States where students either were already wealthy or aspired to the wealth of their cohort, at this university in the northeastern United States with students who came from backgrounds of economic struggle I found a hunger to openly discuss patterns and pain of economic dispossession. In this context, I introduced Marxist and materialist critical theory to the students so that when looking at the Forge Project’s beautiful website, the glisteningly presented miseen-scène contained therein, we could peel back contradictory layers of money, need, privilege, desire, and profound artistic accomplishment which is art history’s role to navigate. The students were eager to find Indigenous art that had thoroughly rejected capitalist systems of exchange in its path to visibility. But art taught in the art history classroom emerges from earlier processes of gatekeeping; gatekeeping tightly enfolded in capitalist structures and the outsider adjunct is part of that structure of partitioning art.

The Rebel And yet, in art works that reflect realities of laboring as part of capitalism’s proletariat, revealing the subject as part of the laboring machine of industrial capitalism, emerge a locus of protest. It is to such images that I now turn. Mohawk Bay of Quinte artist Shelley Niro creates photographic works that address the twinned forces of capitalist exploitation and settler colonialist violence. Niro’s photographic series and short film, The Shirt, succinctly boils down the bitterly unjust capitalist exchange system of coloniality in which Indigenous people have been killed, assimilated, their land stripped from them, and in exchange “given” the tawdry goods of capitalism (a T-shirt) which often as not is also taken away by Whites.31 Niro’s Ghosts, Girls, Grandmas draws through intergenerational pain and survivorship, creating a palimpsest of ancestors, progenitors, and progeny who ­ hiquita give strength.32 This series includes a striking portrait of the artist’s mother June C Doxtater. Through this elegant portrait that testifies to surviving the conditions of hard manual labor, Ghosts, Girls, Grandmas navigates a subtle response to the nexus of capitalist settler-colonialism concretized as access to money. Such wealth amorphized into coloniality’s claim of cultural capital, Niro exposes in her portrait of her mother framed by wampum (Figure 16.1). 233

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Figure 16.1  Shelley Niro from Ghosts, Girls, Grandmas, “Grandmas,” fifth image in a series of five, 2004–2007, Digital chromogenic B&W print on fiber-based archival paper, 104.1 × 78.7  cm. Collection of Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, Ontario. © Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist.

Ms. Doxtater worked throughout her life, from girlhood to mature adulthood, harvesting tobacco and cleaning houses for others.33 Her experience in the labor force is a crystallizing aspect of her daughter’s sublime portrait. Here, Ms. Doxtater takes her place with ancestors and progeny (the ghosts and daughters of Ghosts, Girls, Grandmas), her keenly intelligent gaze, neat hairstyle, and weathered skin bearing testimony to the force of survivance.34 She is the origin of the art, because she is the origin of the artist. Niro creates an intensely personal, loving, portrait of her mother as both art’s origin and also a member of that group economists call the “working” class. In this image, the elegiac adoration of the mother and recognition of her strength in survival come together. Wampum frames the image in a Haudenosaunee gaze. Along these lines, Niro’s earlier portrait of her mother, The Rebel, stages an immediate, if on the surface more light-hearted, contestation of identity in capitalism. The Rebel is a quickwitted response to settler colonialist violence through capitalism. In The Rebel, Niro’s mother drapes herself across a rougher-for-the-wear car, The Rebel, manufactured by American Motor Corporation. Niro’s 1987 photograph reaches back temporally to 1957 the year when AMC introduced The Rebel. The model shown in Niro’s photograph appears to be 1967, hence, her mother poses on a 20-year-old car. The Rebel was marketed as a muscle car, but by the time it finds its way to Indigenous communities it is worn down, rusted. This capitalist dance 234

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Figure 16.2  Shelley Niro The Rebel 1982/87, hand-tinted photograph, gelatin silver print, 35 × 42 cm. Collection of Indigenous Art Centre, Indigenous and Northern Affairs, Canada, Ottawa, Ontario. © Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist.

is beautifully foiled in Niro’s tender portrait of her spirited mother. The gambit of industrial capitalism, that the new object will renew you, here is marked by time, rust, erosion. Niro’s mother, June Chiquita Doxtater, poses on the car in a style spoofing mid-twentieth-century car advertisements, where sex and commercialism blur together. In Niro’s late 1980s portrait, the old and worn-down car reveals a side of capitalism that commercials seek to hide: goods break down. The woman “selling” the car does not match the stereotype of the ultra-thin, late adolescent, White woman deployed to sell cars in settler-colonialist commercials (Figure 16.2). While one might discuss Niro’s photographs as corrective representations of Indigenous women, and certainly they are, I point to how The Rebel and The Shirt unsettle the slick and destructive truisms of settler capitalism. The Rebel leverages a trenchant economic analysis through its countering position of sacred familial bonds. In The Rebel, Niro’s attention to the damages of Indigenous dispossession invokes a pivotal scene in her 1993 experimental film Honey Moccasin in which the eponymous heroine’s parents are killed, the cause of the accident a geriatric truck that stalls out on train tracks.35 Worn out cars are one of the throw-away objects of capitalism. Niro’s protest against the way that settlercolonialism attempts to erase those to whom suffering is assigned by rapacious capitalist structures, emerges in The Rebel, The Shirt, and in Ghosts, Girls, Grandmas. Niro’s portraits of her mother illuminate the strength of Indigenous women through their ability to sustain identity and presence despite coloniality’s repeated efforts to erase them. Her work is a feminist anticolonialist protest against the stereotyping and invisibility of Indigenous women because her work contests settler capitalism.36 235

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Decolonizing Contingencies A critique of capitalism is not contingent to but at the core of the work of decolonization. Ensconced in the apparatus of reproducing cultural capital in the corporatized university, laboring as an adjunct professor of art history, one has implicitly agreed to serve as a purveyor of cultural capital by teaching a storyline that does not puncture, dissect, interrupt, or disturb the illusion of capitalism as flow and progress. But far from being fluent, capitalism is a structure of stagnation and agglutination, a process of material goods continually falling to ruin. It is around the economically dispossessed that the ruins accrue; dispossessing Indigenous peoples is the bedrock of settler capitalism. Niro stings capitalist culture’s torpidity (revealing capitalism as a violent system) in her works The Rebel, and Ghosts, Girls, Grandmas, as well as The Shirt. Taboos against peeling back the layers of class privilege and aspiration that ensconce collegiate education make the work of truly decolonizing art history in the university challenging. Marketed as a field of concentration bringing the student panache and polish, art history is never more so a site of economic contestation than when the putative professor is an adjunct paid less than minimum wage for her labor of proffering cultural capital. Given her powerlessness within the corporate system of academia, for her to speak in dissent from the capitalist artworld pushes against the very reason she has been hired: to do the dirty work of this system, to provide continued buttress to the artworld’s ideology by sacrificing her labor in work so poorly paid as to be only symbolically remunerative. Teaching at the state university in the northeastern United States where many students came from backgrounds of economic struggle, our classroom seminar gravitated toward the kind of economic critique that positionally, as an adjunct, I needed to avoid to stay employed. And yet studying works of Indigenous women artists became a process of shared awe and class discussions became passionate as students added layer on layer of insight into the debased elements of settler capitalist materiality. We collectively discovered in Indigenous American women’s art protests against settler capitalist purloin of Indigenous history. As the semester converged toward this communal agreement that we would critique settler colonialist systems from the vantage of critiquing settler capitalism, the mood in the classroom became one of camaraderie. To be able to draw connections between Niro’s work and an Indigenous critique of capitalist violence, interpreting Indigenous America’s mistrust of the machine of settler capitalism, imparted to the class a feeling of finally being able to say yes, this is art! It came as scant surprise that at the end of the term the departmental chair told me he could not find a place for me in next year’s schedule. Why bring into the classroom methods of analysis that critique the very frame within which the classroom exists: that of capitalist control of academia’s intersection with the artworld? Why study Indigenous practices of resistance in art? Do these exercises in speaking the unspoken subtext of settler-capitalist-academia have a place in the college classroom if the university’s entanglement with the capitalist artworld and corporate values, and the adjunct’s subaltern role, are all left intact? Just as Delphy argues that women within heteropatriarchy are an oppressed class even when connected to financially secure men (it is his wealth that dictates her subaltern position), so also art history’s adjuncts perform as acolytes of a structure of cultural capital, capital to which they have no substantive access, occupying a hidden eddy of economic oppression within the artworld’s apparent surface of wealth. To decolonize art history necessitates radically altering the capitalist structures that uphold contemporary academia. 236

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Notes 1 Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Eric Fure-Slocum and Claire Goldstene, Eds. Contingent Faculty: A Labor History (Champaign: ­ ­University of Illinois Press, 2023). 2 Christine Delphy, “Patriarchy, Feminism, and Their Intellectuals” in Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, Trans. and edited by Diana Leonard (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 138–153. 3 In this chapter, rather than saying feminine persons, I use the words woman and women as Christine Delphy deploys the terms: women as a happenstance name given to a group of people conjoined in an implicit caste. This usage of the term is intrinsically inclusive of cis and trans women. On the debilitating terms of adjuncting, see Adam Harris, “Death of an Adjunct,” The Atlantic, April 8th, 2019 https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/adjunct-professorshigher-education-thea-hunter/586168/ Accessed May 21st, 2022. 4 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Paul Kegan (London: Routledge, 1984); Christine Delphy, “Rethinking Sex and Gender,” Women’s Studies International Forum 16, no. 1 (1993): 1–9. 5 Judith Butler, for example, borrows from Delphy and from Monique Wittig, covering this borrow by erroneously charging these earlier theorists with essentialism. See Teresa De Lauretis, Figures of Resistance: Essays in Feminist Theory (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007). 6 Delphy’s argument is that all traditional wives, shorn of their husband’s income, are economically impoverished, revealing that all women (in a heterosexist patriarchy) are proletariat because they lack access to the means of the production of capital. This argument I extrapolate to adjunct labor: while some adjuncts may well have access to money from other sources, were they to earn their living only as adjuncts, poverty would be universal for this group. 7 Regarding adjunct pay, see, Colleen Flaherty, “Barely Getting By,” Inside Higher Ed, April 20th, 2020 https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/20/new-report-says-many-­a djuncts-makeless-3500-course-and-25000-year Accessed May 21, 2022; See also this survey conducted by the American Federation of Teachers, reported in 2022, which reflects that in 2020 and 2021 40% of adjuncts needed government assistance to make ends meet, while 25% earned salaries below the federal poverty line. While it might seem these dire circumstances stem from the pandemic, a survey conducted by the same federation before the pandemic indicated circumstances even worse than during the pandemic, with one-third of adjuncts earning below poverty line salaries, and three-quarters of adjuncts having no job security beyond a single term. My own salary from 2007 to 2020 varied according to how many courses I was offered each year. The university was under no obligation to offer me courses sufficient to raise my earnings above the poverty line, nor was the university obliged to hire me beyond each given year in which I was teaching, despite my many consistent years of teaching for this same university. Women make up the majority of non-tenure track lecturers and instructors. American Federation of Teachers “Report Shows Alarming Levels of Poverty Among Adjunct Faculty” https:// www.aft.org/news/report-shows-alarming-poverty-among-adjunct-faculty Accessed July 29, 2022. 8 Tim Schneider, “Goodbye Art World, Hello Art Industry,” Artnet News, November 25th, 2019 https://news.artnet.com/market/how-the-art-world-became-the-art-industry-1710228 Accessed May 1, 2022. Dave Beech, Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical, and Marxist Economics (Chicago: Haymarket, 2015), 211–241. 9 Tracey Moffatt, Laudanum (1998), a series of 19 photogravures, 48.2 × 37.4 cm (image) 76.3 × 56.6 cm (sheet). 10 My research indicates that the model performing as the servant may not be Asian but a Pacific Islander. The series’ point regarding racism stands regardless. https://www.mca.com.au/artistsworks/works/2004.43.10/ Accessed July 29, 2022. 11 Adjunct labor is definitionally exploitative. Financial compensation does not equal what tenureline faculty are paid for the same work, employee benefits are scant and often nonexistent, and instability of employment is endemic for many adjuncts. See, Coalition on the Academic Workforce “A Portrait of Part-Time Faculty Members,” (2012) http://www.academicworkforce.org/survey. html Accessed May 5, 2021.

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Claire Raymond 12 Dennis Deslippe, Eric Fure-Slocum, and John McKerley, Eds. Civic Labors: Scholar Activism and Working Class Studies (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016). 13 Here, I indicate that revealing to one’s students the extreme structural vulnerability and powerlessness of one’s position within the academy would, paradoxically, make one more vulnerable to losing employment, risking being interpreted as a trouble-maker while occupying a role like that depends on one’s performance of servility. 14 Christine Delphy, “The Main Enemy,” Feminist Issues 1 (1980): 23–40. 15 Sanjiv Gupta, “Autonomy, Dependence, or Display? The Relationship Between Married Women’s Earnings and Housework,” Journal of Marriage and Family 69, no. 2 (2007): 399–417; Christine R. Schwartz and Hon Han “The Reversal of the Gender Gap in Education and Trends in Marital Dissolution,” American Sociological Review 79, no. 4 (2014): 605–629. 16 Brad Buckley and John Conomos, Eds. Who Runs the Artworld: Money, Power and Ethics (­Oxfordshire: Libri Publishing, 2017). 17 Philip J. Deloria, “The New World of the Indigenous Museum,”  Daedalus  147, no. 2 (2018): 106–115. 18 Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard, Familiar Exploitation: A New Analysis of Marriage in Contemporary Western Societies (London: Polity, 1992). 19 Sheila Coronel, Steve Coll, and Derek Kravitz “Rolling Stone and UVA: The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Report” Rolling Stone https://www.rollingstone.com/ culture/culture-news/rolling-stone-and-uva-the-columbia-university-graduate-school-ofjournalism-­report-44930/ Accessed June 2, 2022. 20 Campus sexual assault realities belie the retrospective narrative of the Rolling Stone article’s ­holistic falseness. See, Claire Raymond, and Sarah Corse. “A Distorting Mirror: Educational Trajectory After College Sexual Assault,” Feminist Studies 44, no. 2 (2018): 464–490. 21 Tara Atluri, “Blood Red: Rebecca Belmore’s Vigil of Exile” in Performing Exile: Foreign Bodies, Ed. Judith Rudakoff, Intellect (2017): 143–160; Arianne E. Eason, Laura M. Brady, and Stephanie A. Fryberg. “Reclaiming Representations & Interrupting the Cycle of Bias Against Native Americans,” Daedalus 147, no. 2 (2018): 70–81. 22 Catherine Summerhayes, “Haunting Secrets: Tracey Moffatt’s Bedevil,” Film Quarterly 58, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 14–24. 23 It is notable that Moffatt, an Aboriginal Australian artist, has work in the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, the institution for which I was teaching. The uncanniness of this colonialist enterprise, the Kluge-Ruhe, is hard to exaggerate: in the midst of Indigenous American (Monacan) land, the ultra-wealthy Kluge family shaped a space in which to expropriate Aboriginal Australian art. 24 Tina M. Campt “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory  29, no.1 (2019): 79–87; Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Just Like a Woman,” in Ann Gabhart, Ed., Francesca Woodman: Photographic Work (Wellesley, MA: Museum and Hunter College Art Gallery, 1986), 14–35. 25 I have made every effort to protect student identities while yet accurately conveying important aspects of classroom demographics that fomented this exchange. 26 Pierre Bourdieu “The Forms of Capital,” in Imre Szeman and Timothy Kaposy, Eds., Cultural Theory: An Anthology, 1st ed. (Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 81–90. 27 https://artistprofile.com.au/who-runs-the-artworld/ Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London: Pluto, 2010). 28 Susan A. Miller and James Riding In, Eds. Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011). 29 Artforum describes The Forge Project thus: “The Forge Project, a new, Hudson Valley, New York–based initiative aimed at supporting Indigenous artists … founded by philanthropist Becky Gochman with executive director Candice Hopkins, who is a citizen of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation, director of education Heather Bruegl,  a Stockbridge-Munsee descendent and member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, and  Zach Feuer, the Forge Project is meant to serve as a point of influence for the broader art world. In addition to the fellowships, which are solely funded by Gochman, the initiative will offer educational programs aimed at fostering dialogue about decolonization. The Forge Project is also putting together a collection of works by Native American artists, of which it has amassed about one hundred to date” Artforum, August 12th,

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The Unbearable Lightness of Adjuncting Art History 2021 https://www.artforum.com/news/forge-project-announces-inaugural-residencies-in-supportof-indigenous-artists-86339 Accessed May 30, 2022. 30 Lucy Alexander “Neutrality Is Racism: How a Teenage Horse Riding Champion Called Out Inequality in the Equestrian World,” Robb Report January 30th, 2021, https://robbreport.com/ lifestyle/sports-leisure/sophie-gochman-racism-equestrian-world-1234591000/ Accessed May 2, 2022; Reetta Humalajoki, “Consumption as Assimilation: New York Times Reporting on Native American Art and Commodities, 1950–1970,” Journal of American Studies 53, no. 4 (November 2019): 972–996. 31 Shelley Niro, Gaëlle Morel, Edward Burtynsky, Wanda Nanibush, and Ryan Rice, Shelley Niro (Göttingen: Steidl, 2018). 32 Shelley Niro, June 5, 2022. The artist in conversation with the author. 33 Shelley Niro, June 5, 2022. The artist in conversation with the author. 34 Gerald R. Vizenor, Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). 35 Shelley Niro, Honey Moccasin (New York: Women Make Movies, 1998). 36 I present a fuller argument regarding Shelley Niro’s insights into capitalist structures and Indigenous resistance in Chapter 4 of my book, Claire Raymond, Photography and Resistance: Anticolonialist Photography in the Americas (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

Selected Bibliography Adam Harris, “Death of an Adjunct,” The Atlantic, April 8th, 2019 https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/adjunct-professors-higher-education-thea-hunter/586168/ Accessed May 21st, 2022. Arianne E. Eason, Laura M. Brady, and Stephanie A. Fryberg, “Reclaiming Representations & Interrupting the Cycle of Bias Against Native Americans,” Daedalus 147, no. 2 (2018): 70–81. Brad Buckley and John Conomos, Eds. Who Runs the Artworld: Money, Power and Ethics (Oxfordshire: Libri Publishing, 2017). Christine Delphy, “Patriarchy, Feminism, and Their Intellectuals,” in Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, Trans. and edited by Diana Leonard (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 138–153. Christine Delphy, and Diana Leonard, Familiar Exploitation: A New Analysis of Marriage in Contemporary Western Societies (London: Polity, 1992). Christine Delphy, “Rethinking Sex and Gender,” Women’s Studies International Forum 16, no. 1 (1993): 1–9. Claire Raymond, Photography and Resistance: Anticolonialist Photography in the Americas (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Eric Fure-Slocum, and Claire Goldstene, Eds. Contingent Faculty: A Labor History (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2023). Philip J. Deloria, “The New World of the Indigenous Museum,” Daedalus 147, no. 2 (2018): 106–115. Shelley Niro, Gaëlle Morel, Edward Burtynsky, Wanda Nanibush, and Ryan Rice, Shelley Niro (­Göttingen: Steidl, 2018). Tina M. Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 29, no.1 (2019): 79–87.

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17 DECOLONIAL CINEMATIC FLOWS Histories, Movements, Confluences Dalida María Benfield

Cinematic Abandonments and World-Creation In the opening moments of one of the films that constitute her installation Community of Parting,1 Jane Jin Kaisen explains the myth of Bari: There is a story that has endured division yet is as old as Division itself. It is the shamanic myth of the Abandoned Princess Bari who was exiled at birth for being born a girl … Bari is not a name. It simply means abandoned. The sentiment of the abandoned surges between speaker and listener, teller and told. Constantly evolving, no one can claim its root. It is many, since each teller infuses her own life story into the telling of the abandoned.2 Throughout the multi-screen cinematic installation, many voices of Bari are seen and heard. She becomes many. Multiple women’s voices manifest the tones and images of the Korean diaspora and its gendered dimensions. These dimensions include the misogyny that is central to the Bari myth itself – the abandonment of the girl-child – as well as the continuing intersectional iterations of oppression that are produced by global colonialities, successive military occupations, forced displacements and dispossessions, the imposition of nationstate borders, and endless wars. In Kaisen’s cinematic artwork, the silencing of the ancient and contemporary voices that tell us of these experiences is audio-visually un-done. Their liberated knowledges echo across diverse times and spaces to create a cacophonous chorus of Bari. This chorus invites us to join its chants and songs, recognizing our multiplicity and cross-border togetherness at the threshold between the living and the dead, at which the figure(s) of Bari resides. The imaginary that is constructed through this cinema is a dispersed community of resistance and survival. The community enacts partings from territories of home, family, and nation-state. It also departs from a colonial episteme, informed by a rigorous and passionate engagement with decolonial pasts and futures. Kaisen creates, with Bari, and with us, another term of engagement with the cinematic apparatus. Our collective abandonment, rather than resulting in our extinction, instead creates worlds (Figure 17.1).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-21 240

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Figure 17.1  Community of Parting. Multi-screen film installation, still. Jane Jin Kaisen, 2019. ­Reproduced with permission of the artist. Copyright Jane Jin Kaisen.

One of the most influential treatises on the world-creating act of decolonizing cinema, the “Third Cinema Manifesto,”3 written by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, declares that a space of cinematic production beyond epistemic and economic colonization is possible when filmmakers abandon modernity/coloniality. Forged through struggle, this site of cinematic production invokes and insists on other futures, while recognizing the stories and images of obscured pasts and presents. The cinemas produced here refuse the epistemic subjugation effected by modernity/coloniality. This subjugation is potently characterized by Enrique Dussel as the encubrimiento (covering) of the Americas, rather than its descubrimiento (discovery).4 This covering over of knowledges and histories of colonized subjects is, however, porous and incomplete. Thinking with Walter Mignolo and Roland Vazquez, the insertion of a “(de)” in the middle of the phrase “modernity/coloniality” signifies this complexity, and the simultaneity of different registers of resistance, recognition, and healing of the decolonial wound within the modern/colonial/capitalist world-system:5 “Decoloniality” appears in between modernity/coloniality as an opening, as a possibility of overcoming their completeness. Decoloniality refers to the variegated enunciations springing from global-local histories entangled with the local imperial history of Euro-American modernity, postmodernity, and altermodernity.6 Third Cinema index of global-local and entangled enunciations of decoloniality. Emerging in the context of the global revolution of 1968,7 including critiques of US economic and cultural imperialism in the Southern Hemisphere of the Americas and elsewhere, Third Cinema theorizes and practices a departure from modernity/coloniality. It is a political, economic, and aesthetic exit point from a mediatized environment saturated by EuroAmerican modernity.

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While initially articulated in this specific time-space, Third Cinema posits the possibility of cinemas that project infinite luminosities and potentialities beyond the longue durée of the modern/colonial/capitalist world-system. In their jointly written manifesto, Getino and Solanas explain that if the first cinema is Hollywood cinema, and second cinema, as a response to Hollywood, is the auteur cinema of cinema novo and the French new wave, then: Real alternatives differing from those offered by the System are only possible if one of two requirements is fulfilled: making films that the System cannot assimilate and which are foreign to its needs, or making films that directly and explicitly set out to fight the System. Neither of these requirements fits within the alternatives that are still offered by the second cinema, but they can be found in the revolutionary opening towards a cinema outside and against the System, in a cinema of liberation: the third cinema.8 The third, for Getino and Solanas, is not only the third of the “Third World,” but the third as an epistemic alternative to the “System.” This “System,” as they articulate it, is US imperialism, global capitalism, and their concomitant ideologies expressed through cultural industries. Marxian anti-capitalism frames their proposed method of revolutionary filmmaking, insisting on the centrality of the masses in the project of liberatory cinema. The filmmaker must follow the masses towards the Third Cinema, and it must not be incorporable within the ideological or economic systems of cinematic production of the first and second cinemas.9 The valorization of proletarian cultures, and the leadership of the masses, is a translation of the communist ideals of the horizonality of power and the abolition of private property into cinematic production. The Third Cinema manifesto also echoes the belief that only the workers can create authentic revolution, articulated in The Communist Manifesto as “The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletariat parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, the overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.”10 This call for revolution by ­Getino and Solanas echoes across other thirds and is transformed in related claims for emancipatory semiotic practices. Other sites and subjectivities evoke other commitments and directionalities, not only following the masses towards a proletarian revolution. The flows of decolonial cinemas cross complex, imbricated sites of alterity within information and communication technologies across variegated landscapes of modernity/(de)coloniality. The differing thirds of contemporary decolonial cinemas may be understood as enunciations that intervene in multiple systemic forms of contemporary global semiotic production. These are as varied as the subjectivities, ways of being and knowing, and geo-political sites of their practitioners. In the context of the Third Cinema conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1989, Homi Bhabha offered another confluence of thinking, proposing the “Third Space” as an already present passage through which decolonial meaning is created in every enunciation, not just those outside of and against the “System.”11 Resonant with Mignolo and Vazquez’s positioning of the (de) between modernity/coloniality, Bhabha performs and creates further possibilities for the third as an imaginative and symbolic operation, a “time-lag” that liberates meaning in multiple directions, not just the Marxian movement of proletarian revolution. He proposes the third space as passage and process, a negotiation of meaning between subjects in formation. This suggests that semiotic enunciations always have the potential of destabilizing orders of meaning, across the ideological,

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psychoanalytic, and geo-political registers of Euro-American modernity. This iteration of a third space produces a sense of the ubiquity and diversity of semiotic interventions in modernity/(de)coloniality. The third space becomes a panoply of hybrid meanings produced by interlocutors at multiple and unstable sites of alterity and transformation. Writing from another discursive and geo-political site, Chela Sandoval articulates a semiotic practice that bridges Getino and Solanas’s “outside and against the System” and Homi Bhabha’s “Third Space,” while expanding the frame to include the tactics of gendered and racialized subjects across the Americas. Sandoval theorizes the tactics for survival of US third world women within modernity/(de)coloniality as “differential consciousness.” These are inventive methodologies authored by oppressed, colonized people, and US third world women in particular, for everyday survival and liberation: “Differential consciousness is described as the zero degree of meaning, counternarrative, utopia/no-place, the abyss, amor en Aztlán, soul.”12 Sandoval theorizes resistance as an inclusive, ever-changing field of epistemic and semiotic strategies. This “methodology of the oppressed” produces a creative space of moving both between fields of meaning and creating anew. Understood as a decolonial cinematic practice, “differential consciousness” is a strategy of filmmaking and of film viewing/reading/listening. Interpreting and critiquing films by attuning oneself to the stories that are obscured or marginalized by them is, for example, a practice of “differential consciousness.” This underlining of the agency of the viewer/reader/listener echoes the horizontality insisted on by Third Cinema, while positioning it within a more complex understanding of subjectivities. Both Bhabha and Sandoval posit decolonial semiotic practices as fundamentally co-constituted and collective produced in the act of communication between interlocutors in diverse global-local sites. Their theorizations illuminate the many potential sensorial, aesthetic, political, and formal articulations of decolonial cinemas. Positioned in another time-space, filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety also expands the scope of decolonial cinema, by refiguring cinema’s very genealogy and kinship: Cinema was born in Africa, because the image itself was born in Africa. The instruments, yes, are European, but the creative necessity and rationale exist in our oral tradition. As I said to the children before, in order to make a film, you must only close your eyes and see the images. Open your eyes, and the film is there … What is said is stronger than what is written; the word addresses itself to the imagination, not the ear. Imagination creates the image and the image creates cinema, so we are in direct lineage as cinema’s parents.13 With this, Mambety creates a trans-disciplinary lineage of word and image creation, drawing upon new media and old technologies of telling, emphasizing orality as the most important form of address to the imagination. Against the histories of cinema that site the West as its birthplace, Mambety reclaims cinema as a collective Indigenous African practice of imagination offered to the world. This re-telling of the genealogy of cinema re-temporalizes it in an array of historical forms of human communication. It becomes just one of many technologies of communication throughout human history, which begins in Africa. The privileging of cinema itself as a form of communication is an oppressive trope of modernity/ coloniality that sub-alternizes other forms of communication. This de-centered understanding of cinematic practice underlines that it is only one amongst an infinitude of tools, owned by all of us. If we open our eyes, it is there.

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Herramientas Colectivas (Collective Tools) In the contemporary context of the late stage of the modern/colonial/capitalist world-­ system that has digital information technology at its core, decolonial cinemas continue in multiple trajectories and genealogies, in the forms of films, digital video, multi-screen video installations, Internet art, and more. Understanding decolonial cinemas requires a differential consciousness that engages these forms across geo-political locales, semiotic fields, cultural economies, and intersecting oppressions. Each confluence confers different strategies of knowing and resistance to modernity/coloniality. There are numerous filmmakers and artists whose works create audio-visual assemblages that resonate as decolonial cinemas. When thought together, the work of these artists becomes an entangled site of political and economic arrangements across a range of platforms, means of production, distribution channels, and aesthetic practices. These iterations reconstruct relations of power in and through global media flows, but also refigure the articulations of that power, including the racialized and gendered discourses of media and digital culture that figure prominently in these technologies. These include the colonial binaries of notions such as “development,” the “Digital Divide,” and the “Global South,” which represent a new turn in the civilizing projects of modernity/(de)coloniality, discourses flowing from colonizer to colonized, center to periphery, north to south, or east to west, which have served to devalue those knowledges and systems of representation that lie beyond their constructed boundaries.14 Directly engaging digital cinemas and their interrelation with the late phase of the capitalist world-system, Trinh T. Minh-ha articulates powerful amalgams of aesthetic interventions against these proposed civilizing discourses. Discussing her digital film The Fourth Dimension, she accentuates the role of ritual that emerges in it: “Small and singular are what characterizes the faces of resistance in the age of globalization.”15 Rituals are ways that humans order our existence, an activity that, contrary to being destroyed by contemporary conditions, finds new forms. Trinh emphasizes the continuity of rituals: We are all engaged in rituals in our daily activities, and by remaining unaware of their ritual propensity, we remain in conformity … One should treat rituals as rituals if one is to step out of the servile one-dimensional mind and turn an instrument into a creative tool.16 Ritual is imbued with a politics of unincorporability. As a connection to artistic, spiritual, and historical processes, ritual provides a path towards understanding meaning making as a sacred ancestral activity. Rather than ritual as a “passive” act, she calls for the turning of ritual into “creative tools.” Trinh also foregrounds the importance of time as an aspect of the transgressive potential of ritual experience. Experiences of time, and the compression or de-compression of time-space, then, also become politicized. In this context, “Slowness as a strategy of resistance is much needed in the speed of urban routine life.”17 This possibility opens the door to conceptions of the digital self as thoughtful, active, creative, and taking her own good time against the top speed of the flow of information of digital culture. Returning to the cinematic moment that opens this chapter, slowness and ritual are also central strategies in Jane Jin Kaisen’s Community of Parting. One channel of the multiscreen installation consists of Kaisen, in ceremonial dress, spinning, with a drone camera suspended close to her face. As she spins, the drone is let loose, and it rises above her 244

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spinning body, dramatically revealing its context: A bountiful green landscape. While Kaisen becomes a tiny spot of animated vibrancy, her ritual spinning seems to have birthed this world. The cinematic apparatus, the ritual of spinning, and the sense of wonder at the planet, our shared environment, are fused. This transformation of viewing and spectatorship into a ritual of togetherness and appreciation for our collective being is also on a continuum with the decolonial strategies of third space thinking and differential consciousness. It is a re-signification of the time-space of the landscape and the introduction of a time lag that leads us onto a different path of meaning-making. It is she who has created this landscape, and we are invited to embrace her difficult histories as our own. The multiple screens and the cyclic repetition of the chapters of Kaisen’s work also serve to create a cinematic experience that exits the single screen and captive audience that is sutured to the ideologies18 that characterize both the first and second cinemas. Kaisen’s work is displayed, in galleries and museums, on multiple screens, with each channel’s reel repeated. Understood in the context of ritual and slowness, in this work, which is layered with historical information and storytelling about the Korean War and its aftermath, it becomes an invitation to linger on the unfolding information, while acknowledging the partiality of each narrative trajectory. This partiality itself is an acknowledgement of the unincorporability of the truths of the multiple voices evinced in the work. They evade the totalizing scripts of the master narratives of modernity/(de)coloniality and liberate the viewer/reader/listener from a sutured relationship to a single screen of projected ideological interpellation. Practices of decolonial cinema vary across geo-political locations, imaginaries, and the social relations they produce. Practitioners of diverse genealogies variously understand the first, second, and third cinemas as articulated by Getino and Solanas. The hegemonic power of first cinema, Hollywood, is relative. It does not exert the same influence everywhere. For some, the defining hegemonic presence of modernity/coloniality via cinematic production takes on other forms. These other, varied hegemonic modes of production exert their own particular economic and aesthetic limits on what can be made. They issue from and are bound up with the different histories of modernity/(de)coloniality in specific geo-political locations, producing such questions as: Who or what is a filmmaking entity, a single director or a collective? Who or what is the subject of the film, and what processes engage that subject? Who is the intended audience and how does it reach them? The subject construction of individual filmmakers and film viewers/readers/listeners – at each site of production – is infinitely varied. Depending on geo-political context, genealogies of communication technologies, and the constitution of political affinities, the praxical struggle for liberatory ­cinemas is situated and contingent. However, the framework of first, second, and third remains analytically, politically, and aesthetically useful for a project of decolonizing cinema and recognizing and producing a decolonial media aesthetics. It offers a method for situating theories and practices of decolonial cinemas in relation to what they are working against and outside of, within, as well as towards. The ever-ongoing transformation of cinema as a social technology in the form of the Internet complicates but does not exhaust the terms of Third Cinema. Instead, it provides a still useful framework that suggests a multiplicity of new directions for decolonial cinemas. With the distribution of production across multiple users and platforms, it is difficult to conceive of first or second cinemas as stable economic or ideological hegemonies. Rather, there are a plurality of molecular forms that reach diverse audiences across multiple scales of audiences and economic arrangements. Including TikTok, Netflix, Vimeo, 245

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and YouTube, amongst other online platforms, as vivid and viable forms of decolonial cinematic production and distribution on micro-economic and interpersonal communication scales, as well as mass distribution, changes how we might approach the analysis of first, second, and third cinemas. Upon landing on the home page of the Distancia web series, co-directed by Camila Marambio and Carolina Saquel, the compelling and poetic language of the text that captions the trailer automatically plays: Seeking more just ways of living and dying, an unusual group of researchers traverses the erratic geography of Tierra del Fuego interrogating the enigmatic relationship between landscape and crime. Consisting of 7 episodes, the first season of Distancia is a poetical non-linear story that captures the entanglement of activists, trees, ghosts, artists, scientists, and the wind, all drawn in by the construction of a road that traverses the main isle of the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego, Chile.19 This evocative and complex language signals that the project of Distancia is much more than the production of video works, but is rather an inquiry into learning, making, and being in the particular space of Tierra del Fuego, and the transformation of the cinematic apparatus as a tool in that inquiry. The framing of the screens in the website itself also speak to this meta-cinema; the screens are each captioned by equally evocative texts, and the “about” page elaborates the initial paragraph quoted above: Tierra del Fuego resists being grasped by canonical approaches to knowledge. If objective observation, ethnographic interpretation and geographic analysis seem to have exhausted themselves, what other method is there? Or must the query be abandoned all together? But how does one abandon a desire, and the question of how to learn an other’s language, its language? Peripheral tactics must be attempted. Like a horror story that fictionalizes a crime to stir up the emotion of fear, Distancia fictionalizes the method of Ensayos through which a group of researchers in Tierra del Fuego comes closer to comprehending the archipelago. A collaboration between humans and more-than-human is the first of many generative multiplicities produced by the videos that constitute Distancia. The works engage multiple formal modalities of experimental film, video art, and documentary, and they always include multiple voices and viewpoints. While they are described as a “web series,” it is also possible to view them as an online video installation, as the site allows for each episode to play simultaneously on a shared screen. This produces a playfulness, and a rupture of the conventions of what a “web series” might be, positioning the viewer as an active curator of the durational/spatial relationships of the videos (Figure 17.2). In the first episode, entitled “Location,” location is posed as a site constructed, or devastated, by humans. It opens with Ivette Martínez’s drawing of the road through Tierra del Fuego, the road we assume will be traversed by the group of researchers and the camera. In this episode, however, the camera falls off the road – the physical road as well as the road as trope, as thematic genre or pathway of storytelling. The camera veers quite freely around its territory, not sticking to the road. It moves alongside or against the directionality and spatiality of the road. This veering off opens the formal space of the video as one of poetic experimentation, without the need for diegetic information that names places and people. 246

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Figure 17.2  Untitled (camino), Distancia, Ensayos web series, video still. Directed by Camila ­Marambio and Carolina Saquel, 2017. Reproduced with permission of the artists. Copyright Carolina Saquel.

The road is drawn so that it may be avoided, and yet it haunts all of the works as a trace/ echo of human movement. In each of the proximate episodes there is more or less of this activity of the camera, of its veering off road, as well as of further road naming and drawing. Roads, pathways of meanings, cosmologies and genealogies, territories and deterritorializations, and the stories of people, told by them, are entered and exited through the places, voices, plants, minerals, water, landscapes, human structures, tools, and other beings that exist along the archipelago mapped by the camera. The episodes, entitled “History,” “Memory,” “Spectre,” “Strategy,” “Ñirres,” and “Future,” could be measured by their visual attachment to the human figure. The intimacy of the camera is experienced across these episodes in inverse relation to the lens’ depiction of the human. This side-lining of the human, like the side-lining of the road, is an activity of research, an inquiry into other ways of knowing, beyond canonical forms of knowledge. The moments that are captured between people, and between the people in the frame and the spectator, begin to speak more of the absence of other more-than-human presences, because we begin to understand, and feel, the pulse of those others, and how humans ignore them. This evocative tension is troubled by the use of documentary/ethnographic framing of speakers at some moments. However, the reframing, off roading, of the human is epitomized by the final episode, which features drone footage of this territory, ending, poetically, with the return of the drone to a human. The wanderings of the drone seem to take on its own agency, and view. The human is a becoming, in relation to the camera and the landscape. Moving laterally to a parallel off-road moment, in the opening of their seminal film, La Hora de los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces), Getino and Solanas offer a visual essay that links the economic condition of US imperialism to the audio-visual conditions of the urban environment and, in turn, capitalist cinema. The film constitutes an audio-visual 247

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accompaniment to their written manifesto. In a series of rolling pan shots of an A ­ merican cityscape in the Southern Hemisphere, the omnipresence of consumer capitalism is unfurled. The city’s inhabitants are framed by neon signs and other architectural features of the city, creating a sense of claustrophobic experience of modernity/coloniality. On the soundtrack, a contrapuntal narrative analyzes these conditions and offers alternatives. Spectators are thus situated in a spatial and temporal present of a shared locality and collective analysis. The film lifts the ideological veil that naturalizes the sensorial ways that the modern/colonial/capitalist world-system has permeated the environment, including our imaginations. This visual-aural and discursive critical analysis of the activities and architectures of capitalism situate them at a critical distance, insisting that they are only one of an infinity of possibilities of how we might inhabit the earth. As the film ends, the following words appear: The experiences and conclusions that we have assembled are of relative worth; they are to be used to the extent they are useful to you, who are the present and future of liberation … this is why the film stops here; it opens out to you so that you can continue it.20 This is an invitation to being together, now, here, in a moment of shared knowledges and a collective space of possibility. The active participation of the spectator in meaning making and the creation of subjective agency is also an act of de-suturing from what may be alternatively understood as the first and second cinemas, the cinematic apparatus, or the attention economy. In this space, conversation continues after the cinematic experience and constructs other trajectories of knowledge production and collective pedagogy. We, its spectators, supplement the film with the stories of its next chapters: The actions we take in our own lives.

De-suture Colonial wounds endure but are also refigured in the twenty-first century. They are spaces of memory and creativity, as well as sites of mourning and transformation. The intertwined movements of coloniality and decoloniality echo across the global mediascape, whispering old stories while also producing new narratives. Coexisting moments cross east/west and north/south divides. New assemblages of power emerge along with equally complex amalgams of resistance, producing multiple and competing representational regimes. The cinemas and digital media of contemporary, transnational new media artists continue, rupture, and re-signify the aesthetic and political projects of decolonizing cinema and culture, producing multiple trajectories and genealogies. The multiplicity of decolonial media aesthetics is inherent to the notion of Third Cinema, which has been born and nurtured in many different locales, and may be understood as emancipatory cinematic insurgencies, pre- and post-dating the Third World and expanding its geo-political and time-space boundaries. These decolonial cinemas both emerge from and produce novel third spaces, which are epistemic, political, and economic interventions in the modern/colonial/capitalist world-system. Cinema, information technologies, coloniality/modernity and its legacies, and global capitalism are intertwined.21 The visualities of Eurocentric modernity have depended on cinematic technologies. Three-point perspective, the panoramic painting, the lens, the stereoscopic photograph and cinema emerged in tandem with the mapping of the world-system’s 248

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centers and peripheries. The lens is inscribed with these gendered chrono- and geo-­politics.22 But the lens is glass. It is sand, from the sea, and stardust. It tells and remembers multiple stories. It is infused with the multiplicities of its histories and encounters. It has more than two sides, and more than two points for the entry and exit of light. It has been made porous by the memories of all who have seen or been seen through it, traveled through it across time and space. The lens is infinitely mobile, with each placement a re-location and de-location of subject and object. It carries within it the paradox of other points of view, its grains of sand. The lens belongs to no one and everyone. Cinematic media, including film, television, and digital media, are sites of the ongoing contestation of the scopic regimes of modernity/(de) coloniality, and the cinematic projects of those whose worlds, economies, and geo-political locations lie outside of or in opposition to it, have been in persistent conflict. The tools are remade and re-signified again and again. Our bodies and the tools code and re-code each other. In each instance, there is a new meaning and a new movement of the technology, another transformation of being across the porosity of consciousness and the cinematic apparatus.

Notes 1 Jane Jin Kaisen, Community of Parting, multi-screen film installation, 2019. 2 Jane Jin Kaisen, “Community of Parting Manuscript,” in Community of Parting, edited by Anne Kølbæk Iversen and Jane Jin Kaisen (Copenhagen: Archive Books, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Publishing, and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, 2021), 233. 3 Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, “Towards a Third Cinema,” New Latin American C ­ inema: Volume One, Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, ed. Martin Michael (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 42. 4 Enrique Dussel, 1492: El Encubrimiento Del Otro: Hacia El Origen Del “Mito De La Modernidad” (Bogota: Anthropos, 1992). 5 The concept of the “modern/colonial/capitalist world-system” is co-constructed by Enrique ­Dussel (2002), Ramón Grosfoguel, María C. Lugones, Walter Mignolo, Anibal Quijano, Immanuel Wallerstein, Catherine Walsh, and others. It combines world-systems analysis with the decolonial projects emerging from Latin American and US Latinx/o/a political and philosophical work. 6 Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez, “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings,” Social Text: Periscope: Decolonial Aesthesis, July 15, 2013, Accessed April 10, 2022, https:// socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/. 7 Immanuel Wallerstein, “1968, Revolution in the World-System,” Theory and Society 18 (4) (1989): 431–449. 8 Getino and Solanas, 1997, 3. 9 Ibid., 5. 10 Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (New York and London: Penguin Classics, 2015), 95. 11 H.K. Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” in The Location of Culture (2nd ed., New York and London: Routledge, 1994/204), 28–57. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203820551 12 Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 146. 13 N. Frank Ukadike, “The Hyena’s Last Laugh [interview with Djibril Diop Mambety].” Transition 78, 8 (2) (1999), 137. 14 See Dalida Maria Benfield, Decolonizing the Digital/Digital Decolonization, 2009. 15 Trinh T. Minh-ha, 2005. 16 Ibid., 75. 17 Ibid., 11. 18 See Jean-louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Apparatus, ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press), 25–37. 19 Camila Marambio, Distancia, Web series. Accessed April 11, 2022 at https://www.ladistancia.tv/.

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Dalida María Benfield 20 Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces), 260 minutes, 1968. 21 See Armand Mattelart, Networking the World, 1794–2000, translated by Liz Carey-Libbrecht and James A. Cohen (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 22 Paul Virilio and Sylvain Lotringer discuss the difference between “chrono-politics” and “geopolitics” in Pure War, Purse War (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 6: “Today we’re in chronopolitics. Geography is the measuring of space. Now, since the vectors of the post-Second World War period, geography has been transformed. We have entered into another analysis of space which is linked to space-time.”

Selected Bibliography Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Apparatus, edited by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, New York: Tanam Press, 25–37, 1980. Benfield, Dalida María, editor. Decolonizing the Digital/Digital Decolonizations, The Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise Dossier. Volume 31, Global Studies Workshop, Duke University, www. trinity.duke.edu/globalstudies/volume-31-decolonizing-the- digitaldigital-decolonization, 2009. H.K. “The Commitment to Theory.” The Location of Culture (2nd ed.). New York and London: Routledge, 1994/2004, 28–57. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203820551 Dussel, Enrique. 1492: El Encubrimiento del Otro (Hacia el Origen Del “Mito De Modernidad.”). Santafé de Bogotá, DC, Colombia: Ediciones Antropos Ltda, 1992. Dussel, Enrique D, and Alessandro Fornazzari. “World-System and ‘Trans’-Modernity.” Nepantla: Views from South 3, no. 2 (2002): 221–244. muse.jhu.edu/article/23955. Engels, Friedrich, and Karl Marx. The Communist Manifesto. New York and London: Penguin ­Classics, 2015. Getino, Octavio, and Solanas, Fernando. La Hora de los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces), 260 minutes, 1968. Getino, Octavio, and Solanas, Fernando. “Towards a Third Cinema.” New Latin American Cinema: Volume One, Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, edited by Martin Michael, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997, 33–58. Kaisen, Jane Jin. Community of Parting. Multi-screen film installation, 2019. Kaisen, Jane Jin. “Community of Parting Manuscript.” In Community of Parting, edited by Anne Kølbæk Iversen and Jane Jin Kaisen, Copenhagen: Archive Books, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Publishing, and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, 2021, 233. Marambio, Camila. Distancia. Web series. at https://www.ladistancia.tv/ (Accessed April 11, 2022). Mignolo, Walter. “Modernity and Decoloniality.” Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies. https:// www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766581/obo-97801997665810017.xml (Accessed April10, 2022). Quijano, Anibal, and Michael Ennis. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–580. muse.jhu.edu/article/23906. Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Trinh, T. Minh-ha. The Digital Film Event. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. Ukadike, N. Frank. “The Hyena’s Last Laugh [interview with Djibril Diop Mambety].” Transition 78, 8 (2) (1999): 136–153. Virilio, Paul, and Lotringer, Sylvain. Pure War. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Wallerstein, Immanuel. “1968, Revolution in the World-System.” Theory and Society 18 (4) (1989): 431–449.

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18 RE-INDIGENIZING ANCIENT MEXICAN GLYPHIC CODICES Felicia Rhapsody Lopez

This chapter is a direct answer to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s call to decolonize the research done on, with, by, and for Indigenous communities in her landmark book, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People. What I propose here is not merely an expansion of the tools used to understand the Indigenous-authored texts of Mesoamerica. Rather than trying to reconciliate the Western and Indigenous perspectives or use Indigenous perspectives to supplement those of the West, I argue that the Western and Indigenous perspectives are often incompatible, and the Indigenous systems, ideologies, and the corpus of texts must be used in the examination of precontact codices at the exclusion of etic or secondary sources. Only when we can approach texts such as the Codex Borgia from an Indigenous perspective, specifically with an analysis rooted in the language and culture of the given time and place, can we begin to uncover the messages the original authors-artists intended to convey. ln order to explore the concept of writing from a Mesoamerican, specifically Nahua perspective, I will explore how Nahua people of the sixteenth century described their own texts and forms of writing, as they recorded in the alphabetic Nahuatl-language Florentine Codex. The Florentine Codex reveals that the concept of writing extended to a variety of contexts, including the writing of words and images of their ancient texts. The field of art history continues to publish peer-reviewed work by scholars who do not draw connections between these images and the Indigenous words, phrases, and complex local ideologies the images conjure. However, from a decolonial perspective, the entirety of the images within these texts constitutes written communication and must be understood as such. It is the responsibility of the scholars in the field of art history to re-examine these ancient codices using decolonial methods that center Indigenous language, sacred narratives, and worldview, and in so doing, we may increase our potential for understanding these ancient texts.

Background Perspectives on what qualifies as a written language, and what form those written languages must take, varies among Mesoamericanists. And while scholars such as Elizabeth Boone argue that the Mexican pictorial texts qualify as writing, the current popular view 251

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remains that the written languages of Central Mexico such as those of the Nahua and Mixtec, unlike written Mayan language, fail to convey complex ideas that are directly tied to speech. As Katarzyna Dąbrowska states, the prevailing belief remains that “Mixtec and Nahua systems do not totally conform to a linear writing system.”1 Her footnote here is indicative of the current debate regarding this issue. Dabrowsky notes, “I do not wish to enter into a discussion as to whether the method of graphic communication used by the Aztecs (similar to the one used by the Mixtecs) did or did not constitute writing.”2 Ironically, within this article, Katarzyna Dąbrowska convincingly argues that Indigenous writers used logograms to visually construct difrasismos found in spoken Nahuatl. Despite widely accepted theories of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic exchanges between Nahua, Mixtec, and Maya people in their writing styles and symbols, the writing contained within the Central Mexican texts continues to be classified as lacking the ability to convey specific verbal messages to their readers.3 According to Elizabeth Boone: Although to the east the Maya had developed a hieroglyphic script to represent words logographically and syllabically and to reproduce phrases and sentences, the Aztecs, Mixtecs, and their neighbors did not. Instead, their writing consisted of images that are spatially organized in various ways to create visual messages that sometimes parallel spoken language but do not usually record it.4 And while scholars such as Elizabeth Boone acknowledge that deeper meanings are embedded in the images presented in texts, few scholars have followed in the footsteps of early Mesoamericanist Joseph Marius Alexis Aubin, who identified the Nahuatl writing system as syllabic and began publishing glyphic decipherment in 1849. Decipherment of the writing styles of Mesoamerica has yielded tremendous advancements over the last century, especially Mayan logosyllabic writing. This has had a profound impact on the ways that these written languages have been perceived. Few scholars, however, have acknowledged that the writings of Central Mexico function logosyllabically, as the writing of the Maya people does, and, to my knowledge, no scholar has proposed that the text contained within the Codex Borgia represents an example of their complete and formal writing system. The style of writing-painting used in the Codex Borgia has variably been called the Postclassic International Style because of shared use of style and iconography across linguistic divides and the Mixteca-Puebla style, a name suggesting that writers of such texts as the Borgia Codex and similarly styled documents spoke a Mixtec language.5 John Pohl points out that the style is, “now more properly called the Nahua-Mixtec style in light of recognition of its source at Cholula and the cultural groups most responsible for its refinement.”6 The area using this style of writing encompassed at least 15 different language groups, and the exact location of its authorship and therefore the linguistic group(s) their authors belonged to continue to be debated.7 And while some Central Mexican codices, such as the Codex Nuttall and Codex Bodley, are decidedly Mixtec, other books such as those in the Borgia Group, have yet to reveal a clear indication of place of origin to modern readers. Despite the debate regarding the primary language of the authors of these texts, the shared stylistic and symbolic representations among unrelated linguistic groups such as the Mixtec and Nahua in Central Mexico allowed for at least a certain level of mutual understanding of texts regardless of spoken language. The shared style and symbols, in functioning as a written lingua franca, suggests that the writing may draw heavily from the spoken lingua franca of the time—Nahuatl. 252

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Nahuatl writing, as discussed by Gordon Whittaker and Alfonso Lacadena, functions as a l­ ogosyllabic writing system with both logograms and phonograms.8 Whittaker’s recent opus, Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs: A Guide to Nahuatl Writing, provides a comprehensive look at the flexibility and potential of Nahuatl writing. In comparing Nahuatl writing to the logosyllabic writing of Maya, Mycenaean, and Sumerian cultures, Whittaker characterizes Nahuatl writing as “the most complex of the four,” with its ability to (among other things) embed logograms and phonograms simultaneously with a single piece of iconography.9 And while Whittaker challenges some of the characterizations made by late scholar ­Alfonso Lacadena, both agree on two key points: (1) the tlahcuilohqueh most commonly used phonetic writing when recording names of people and places, and (2) scholars have had difficulty with decipherment precisely because of the preponderance of logographic writing. In outlining the differences between different schools of Nahuatl writing throughout Central Mexico, Lacadena points out that in some texts (and in this case the Tepetlaoztoc group of documents), “there are no examples of completely syllabic compounds…. On the contrary, what one finds is an overwhelming use of logographs.”10 And according to Whittaker, between two-thirds to three-quarters of the iconography on two stone monuments consisted of logographic text.11 However, the absence of recognizable phonetic writing does not preclude its existence, nor does it necessitate that the logographic elements be seen as merely picture writing distinct from spoken words. Lacadena points to the importance of Chichen Itza in the quest to decipher Maya writing, where the writing school favored phonetic over logographic writing: It is precisely the substitutions at Chichen Itza in which the name of the deity K’awiil and the words for ‘house’ and ‘fire,’ in addition to appearing in their statistically more common [logographic] forms, are written phonetically … that offer in due course the final evidence for the reading of their respective logograms.12 Lacadena suggests that Nahuatl writing similarly has not been understood wholly because of it being largely made up of logograms. While the work of both Whittaker and Lacadena focuses on colonial documents such as the Codex Mendoza, rather than on the relatively iconographically dense precontact texts such as the Codex Borgia, their arguments suggest that the authors of these older documents had the same writing system at their disposal but relied far less on phonograms (or else seamlessly incorporated them into otherwise unrecognizable glyphic iconography). As such, precontact codices such as the Codex Borgia, both from the perspective of current experts and the original Nahua writer-painters, contain writing that merely has the appearance of not being tied to spoken language because of the frequent use of logograms. At present, however, the deciphered glyphic elements in these texts primarily convey specific names of people or places and have provided little in the way of narrative structure. In reference to Boturini Codex page 1, which shows the Aztecs departing from Aztlan, Elizabeth Boone says: Except for the glyphs composing personal and place names, the graphic components on this page convey meaning without a detour through speech. Functioning outside of spoken language, they help to compose a visual language of graphic convention and spatial relation that is understandable to those familiar with the pictorial conventions.13 253

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In other words, Boone and others argue that while some glyphs such as those for names and places do connect to specific spoken language, the vast majority of the writing does not relate to spoken language, but instead merely provide a structured picture of events. According to Federico Navarrete, belief in the largely non-linguistic nature of Mexican codical writing is shared by others including one of the aforementioned leading scholars in Nahuatl decipherment, Alfonso Lacadena. Navarrete writes, “Students of Aztec writing, most recently A ­ lfonso Lacadena (2008), agree that Aztec glyphic writing was used mainly to denote dates, names of places, and names of persons and deities.”14 Similarly, Whittaker says that while Nahuatl glyphic writing is complex and “true” writing system, in their codices, “iconography reigns supreme, with writing for the most part relegated to dates and to personal-name captions beside the heads, and place-name captions under the feet, of actors in a historical drama or genealogical narrative.”15 However, as Whittaker has stated in reference to the iconographic communication contained within these codices, these glyphs are difficult to identify when they “are integrated into scenes and portrayals as if part of the landscape and part of the depiction.”16

The Nature of Nahuatl Reading and Writing In examining the nature of Nahuatl reading and writing as a Western scholar, it becomes necessary to examine the Nahuatl words for reading and writing to better understand what constituted and constitutes these acts from an Indigenous perspective. While writing in most Western traditions implies the transcription of phonemes, usually onto paper or similar blank surface, the Nahuatl words for writing have a much broader range of meanings. The implication of a more inclusive definition is that a Nahua person need not have worked with paper nor worked with ink to have been considered a writer. The Nahuatl verb ihcuiloa (sometimes spelled cuiloa because of the weak initial vowel i- and the often absent –h-) means, according to early Nahuatl grammarian and writer of the first Nahuatl dictionary Fray Alonso de Molina, to write or paint something. From this verb comes the noun tlahcuiloh (the plural form being tlahcuilohqueh), meaning either s/he wrote-painted something, or one who writes-paints things. And from this verb comes the additional noun, tlahcuilolli, meaning that which is written-painted. The flexibility of these words, to apply to writing and painting, has implied to Western scholars that these words could refer to a writer or a painter, but rather examination of the uses of these words in Nahuatl documents reveal Indigenous conceptions of writing that included media far beyond ink or paint. The pairing of the word for paper, amatl, with the words for writing, though not mandatory, appears frequently within the Florentine Codex. Most of these references, however, do not refer to the production of amoxtli (books or codices), but rather refer to the use of paper in rituals. Documentation on the use of paper, unlike the use of books, suggests its wide use among the general population. For example, not only does the Florentine Codex state that the vendors in the marketplace sell paper (along with metal tools, jewelry, and cloth), but among professions listed is the dedicated business of making and selling paper: the amanamac [ama(-tl) = paper, namaca-c = s/he sold], or the one who sells paper.17 The availability of paper in the marketplace, along with the presence of paper in many of the rituals described, suggests that paper played a significant role in the lives of commoners. And while the paper sold by the amanamacac did not have writing on it, much of the paper described in rituals does. This includes what the Florentine Codex describes as “amatl acaxilqui, ynjc tlahcuilolli.”18 The word acaxilqui is defined as 254

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a particular pattern or scroll design, making the general meaning of the first part of the phrase the general equivalent of Anderson and Dibble’s translation of the whole: “­papers painted with black scroll designs.”19 The second part of this phrase, inic tlahcuilolli, likely appearing in Anderson and Dibble’s translation as the single word “painted” could be more literally translated as “with writing.” Similarly, writing appears on the paper costumes within rituals, where the Nahua authors of the Florentine Codex state, “ynjc tlahcuilolli, yn iamatlatqui, tezcapocyoh.”20 In this phrase, iamatlatqui means her/his paper clothing, tezca(-tl) means mirror or glass, and pocyoh means, according to Fray Alonso de Molina, “cosa que tiene humo.”21 The construction of this phrase, “with ­writing, her/his paper clothing, the mirrors of smoke,” indicates that the writing upon her/his paper clothing displayed the pattern or glyph indicating mirrors of smoke. It also establishes clothing (albeit paper clothing) as a medium for writing, which I will return to below. Merchants were an additional class of Nahua people who regularly wrote on paper. According to Anderson and Dibble’s translation (brackets in the original), the merchants “painted [the paper] with liquid rubber. They impaled the [lump of] rubber on a [copper] spit; thereupon they set it on fire. As it continued to burn, so they painted. And thus did they paint the paper.”22 Here, Anderson and Dibble choose to translate the verb ihcuiloa as to paint rather than to write. This decision may be because these paintings, when described specifically, seem to center on representations of people or animals. However, this should not imply that they held any less meaning than the images that are found in the codices, which also often represent images of people or animals. With this widespread use of paper and writing, as seen in the availability of paper (and ink) products in the marketplace, and the creation of writing by those that included and yet extended outside of the priestly class, the use of paper became synonymous with writing. According to the Online Nahuatl Dictionary, which compiles data from multiple classical Nahuatl sources, the entry for amatl, or paper, states that “not knowing ‘paper’ meant not knowing ‘writing’ (i.e. not knowing how to write).”23 As seen in the Mexica origin story wherein the destruction of the books played a pivotal role in their ethnic identity, the use of paper in ritual likewise suggests that the craft of writing-painting continued to play a significant role within the Nahua population. While these merchants are not described as tlahcuilohqueh (writer-painters), many other artisans (toltecatl) are. According to the Nahuatl text of the Florentine Codex, the tlahcuiloh (writer-painter) is “toltecatl tlachichiuhqui,” the artisan, a maker of things.24 The ensuing description imparts the need to work with colors specifically, as half of the words within the brief description contain either tlil- (black/black ink or dye) or tlapa- (red/colored dye) as a morpheme: “in tlacuiloh, tlilli, tlapalli, tlilatl, ihyalhuil, toltecatl tlachichiuhqui, tlatecollaliani, tlatecolaniani, tlatlilani, tlilpatlac, tlapaltecini, tlapallaliani.”25 I  translate this passage, The writer-artist, the black, the red, the black ink, its woven or wound product, the artist, a maker of things, one who applies black charcoal, one who blackens things with charcoal, one who blackens things with black ink, one who dissolves the black dye, one who grinds the red colors, one who applies the red colors. What is important to note here is that the Nahua writers of the Florentine Codex make no mention of the use of paper, but rather use the word ihyalhuil (which I translate here 255

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as “its woven or wound product”). Although it is unattested in colonial dictionaries (and therefore could apply to the use of ink on paper) in Modern Huastecan Nahuatl the word ihyalhuilia refers to the winding of thread onto a spool or the encircling of someone or something with cloth, rope, or string. My translation is supported by other sections of the Florentine Codex wherein those skilled in clothing construction, either as embroiderers or weavers, are described as tlahcuilohqueh, writer-painters. According to the Florentine Codex, many tlacuilohqueh paid special honor to the day (and likely the teotl) Chicome Xochitl, or Seven Flower. However, in discussing the rituals among the tlahcuilohqueh on the day, the text focuses on the actions of women, specifically the actions of those who embroidered as an occupation. The reason for this is made clear in the Nahuatl text of the Florentine Codex, which states that these embroiderers sought to ensure that their work, “huellahcuilozqueh; in ipan intlahmach intlahcuillol [will be well-painted-written, their painting-writing on their embroidery].”26 In other passages that address women who work in the construction of clothing, the Florentine Codex states that their use of colors, in the dying of thread and the formation of patterns, was an act of writing-painting; “quihcuiloah icpatl [they write-paint it with thread].”27 Other toltecatl, or artisans, in various fields were also described as writer-painters. The Florentine Codex refers to the tlacuilohqueh, the writer-painters; the chalchiuhtlacuilohuque, the green stone workers (writer-painters in green stone); and the quauhtlacuilohque, the wood workers-carvers (writer-painters in wood). According to the Florentine Codex, when feather work was to be done, when the feathers would be set in a design on a given surface, “yehhuantin achto quicuiloa in tlacuilohqueh [they who first wrote it, are the writer-painters].”28 Writing also appeared on gourds and other vessels, such as the tecontlacuilolli, a painted receptacle for chocolate, and the tlacuilolxicalli, a large vessel used for the washing of hands. Tlacuilolli, or writing, also appears in the descriptions of the reed mats and seats (used predominantly for leaders). In addition to the precontact tradition of the amatlahcuiloh, the writers who used paper, and the amoxtlahcuiloh, the writers of books or codices, a multitude of other surfaces were also used in the creation of tlahcuilolli, or writing. For example, in certain contexts, the human body served as a writing surface. The Florentine Codex mentions in the Nahuatl text that “momaihcuiloa, moquechihcuiloa … melchiquiuhihcuiloa, mochichihuatihcuiloa [their hands, their necks, their chests, their breasts were written-painted upon].”29 This is similar to a description in the Florentine Codex of the xicalcoatl, a type of snake, which is said to have on its body, “tlacuicuilolli, huel cuicuiltic [writing-painting in many colors, covered in different colors].”30 This description has the duplicated version of the verb cuiloa, which is cuicuiloa, or “to paint something with many colors” in Modern Huastecan Nahuatl. The derived noun found as the last word in this description, cuihcuiltic, according to Frances Karttunen, means “something painted.”31 That designs such as those upon the snake also represent a form of writing suggests that writing-painting need not be the sole domain of one group of people nor of humans in general. Rather, writing can exist or be created by other non-human living beings or forces. These patterns in nature, however, could acquire meaning to the people and then be reproduced in writing upon paper or other materials. In this way, we can see a complex relationship between the designs and images (often read as purely pictorial by art historians and other scholars) and their significance ideologically and linguistically. Many of these designs, no doubt, became the basis for logograms among linguistically diverse Mesoamerican peoples. 256

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Logosyllabic Writing in the Nahua Codices Much of the imagery contained within early colonial codices such as the Codex Mendoza is easily recognizable today as logosyllabic writing, with discrete glyph blocks or clusters of iconography clearly intended to represent logograms and phonograms of names of people and places. In many instances, the use of logograms corresponds directly to the name and the meaning of the name. For example, the logogram of a hill often represents the word tepetl, or hill, within a larger place name. However, the Tlatelolco and Tepeyacac Glyphs shown in Figure 18.1 represent two uses of similar hills with different linguistic values. In this glyphic block for Tlatelolco in Figure 18.1a, we can see a mound (tlatel) with a set of teeth (tla) and a pot (co). In this case, the logogram for mound gives us the root TLATEL, and we are given a clue as to the correct word for this particular mound with the phonogram derived from the glyph for teeth—from tlantli, or teeth, comes the phonogram tla. The phonogram derived from the glyph for comitl, or pot, gives us the last syllable -co. In the Tepeyacac Glyph in Figure 18.1b, a similar looking hill is shown this time with the earth forming the shape of a nose in profile on one side. The glyph gives us the name Tepeyacac, from tepe(tl)+ yaca(tl)+c, literally “hill nose place,” or “Hill Peak Place.” As Whittaker has suggested, these glyphic elements may not always be so easily recognizable.32 A key example is the representations of tlahcuilohqueh, as seen in both the Codex Mendoza and the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, two early colonial documents. In Tlacuilo Woman, an individual is seated with a long writing implement in her hand. In the case of the writer-painter in the Codex Mendoza, the male figure sits exchanging words (shown via the speech scroll glyphs) with a young man. The writing instrument in his hand just makes contact with the square (perhaps a representation of amatl paper or amoxtli books) in the colors red and black. These colors, the red and the black, or in Nahuatl, in tlilli in tlapalli, represent the difrasismo for writing. Similarly, the design written-painted upon the document in front of the writer-painter appears as two stylized speech scroll glyphs, further supporting the presence of words in Nahuatl writing. Similarly, the Tlacuilo Woman in Figure 18.2 applies black ink to a paper or book. This time, however, there are two distinct

Figure 18.1  (a) Tlatelolco, (tla-TLATEL-[ol]-co), detail from the Codex Xolotl, (b) Tepeyacac, (TEPE-YACA-([c]), detail from the Codex Xolotl. Tlatelolco and Tepeyacac Glyphs redrawn by Justin McIntosh and licensed under CC BY-NC.

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designs painted in red and black. The first is a four-petalled flower (xochitl), and the second is a similarly stylized representation of speech scroll glyphs, this time likely representing sung words (cuicatl), forming the difrasismo in xochitl in cuicatl, the flower and the song, signifying poetry. Similar embedded glyphs can be found in the Borgia Group codices as well. For example, the figure of Tlahuizcalpanteuctli (also spelled Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli) can be found throughout several precontact codices in Central Mexico, as well as in the Mayan Dresden Codex. The Tlahuizcalpanteuctli Glyphs in Figure 18.3 shows the figure of Tlahuizcalpanteuctli as he commonly appears within the Central Mexican texts, a man with distinct body paint, headdress, and attire, which itself serves as a glyphic representation. However, he also appears twice (once in the Codex Borgia and again in another Borgia Group text, the Codex Vaticanus B) with a complex set of symbols, an array of weapons atop a mound, that likewise serves as a glyphic representation of Tlahuizcalpanteuctli. Eduard Seler first identified the image on Codex Borgia 49 (CB49) as Tlahuizcalpanteuctli likely based on his clothing and face and body markings, as well as on the similarity to images of him in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, where he appears in similar attire, sitting atop a mound, and with an alphabetic gloss of his name. According to Mercedes Montes de Oca Vega and Dąbrowska, the shield and the arms, or more specifically “in chimalli in tlahuiztli,” represent a difrasismo indicating war.33 This becomes important because although there are multiple words used to describe arms or weapons in Classic Nahuatl, this particular word (used to describe a particular kind of weaponry) shares the first two syllables with the name of Tlahuizcalpanteuctli. The name Tlahuizcalpanteuctli derives from tlahuizcalli, or “dawn,” making his name translate to “Lord of the Dawn.” Frances Karttunen identifies tlahuizcalli as a compound word formed by combining the words tlahuitl, “red ochre color,” and izcalia, “to revive,” making the Nahuatl word for dawn suggestive of a description of the changing color of the sky.34 Whether or not this is accurate, the use of the tlahuiztli (arms) in Tlahuizcalpanteuctli’s associated iconography strongly suggests this collection of iconography could function as his name glyph. The tlahuiztli is written-painted resting on top of a tlatelli, or mound, such as those seen in the Tlatelolco and Tepeyacac Glyphs of Figure 18.1. Following Alfonso Lacadena’s theories regarding Nahuatl logosyllabic writing, this mound could function as a phonetic complement to clarify the first syllable of the word, tla-, and therefore clarifying the intended word for arms, tlahuiztli. Along with these weapons appears a flag, another identified glyph, pan, from the word pantli (a variant of the word pamitl, or flag). Similarly, as the suffix -pan denotes the position of one thing above or on the surface of another, the -pan- syllable could also be represented here with the placement of the tlahuiztli atop the mound. Finally, the word teuctli (also spelled tecuhtli) appears in the form of the tecpatl, or flint knife, that is contained within the bag and, therefore, possessed (-uh), which together form tecuh. The reading of the possessed flint blade as a glyph for tecuhtli or teuctli is supported by a number of figures within the codices with flint blades at their noses, which yields the Nahuatl word yacatecuhtli (where yacatl means nose), a word whose meaning suggest a lord who leads other lords. According to the Florentine Codex, Yacatecuhtli refers to a specific deity (or family of deities) with five siblings. Further examination of these texts for evidence of embedded glyphic elements would likely yield sufficient data to confirm or refute my proposed decipherment and, more importantly, make significant strides in mapping such iconography. 258

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Figure 18.2  Tlacuilo Woman, detail from Codex Telleriano-Remensis page 30r. Tlacuilo Woman redrawn by Justin M ­ cIntosh and licensed under CC BY-NC.

As such, my current reading of the iconography does not account for a glyphic rendering of each one of the syllables in the name Tlahuizcalpanteuctli, as the syllable -cal-, often designated by a house or a mouth in phonetic Nahuatl writing, is absent from this complex glyphic compound. However, both Lacadena and Whittaker agree that Nahuatl glyphs do not always attempt to write out every syllable of every word.35 My proposed decipherment indicates the presence of the necessary parts to constitute his name according to the work of Whittaker and Lacadena: tla-TLAHUIZ-pan-PAN-tec-uh, or Tlahuiz[cal]panteuc[tli]. The result, as seen in the Tlahuizcalpanteutli Glyphs of Figure 18.3, is a complex image associated with Tlahuizcalpanteuctli but heretofore unrecognized as a complex collection of glyphic elements. Just as the image of Tlahuizcalpanteuctli is, himself, a glyphic representation of his own name, the collection of iconographic elements before him reasserts that name in the text in a more recognizable glyphic style.

Conclusion A reexamination of Nahuatl alphabetic and glyphic texts is long overdue. Such an examination has the potential to yield new understandings, especially in terms of issues related to Indigenous language, culture, and religion. While many of the Nahuatl alphabetic texts have previously been translated into Spanish and, to a lesser extent, English, and many Nahuatl pictorial texts have been interpreted insofar as scholars have identified who and what 259

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Figure 18.3  Tlahuizcalpanteuctli Glyphs, detail from Codex Borgia page 49. Tlahuizcalpanteuctli Glyphs redrawn by Justin McIntosh and licensed under CC BY-NC.

the illustrations present, all these texts have much more knowledge to impart. S­ cholars working from widely available Spanish translations (a highly gendered language with its own embedded ideologies) rather than original Nahuatl texts (a language nearly devoid of gendered language and with entirely distinct ideologies) has contributed to the erasure of women and Indigenous epistemologies. Furthermore, the common view of Nahuatl book writing as pictorial and not anchored to spoken language leads to the false impression that experts have already deciphered the iconography contained therein. By revisiting these texts with a view of them as glyphic and predominantly logographic, further decipherments can be made in the Codex Borgia and other precontact codices, and a greater understanding of the histories of Nahua cultures can be achieved.

Notes 1 Katarzyna Mikulska Dąbrowska, “‘Secret Language’ in Oral and Graphic Form: Religious-Magic Discourse in Aztec Speeches and Manuscripts,” Oral Tradition 25, no. 2 (2010): 325. 2 Ibid. 3 Henry B. Nicholson and Eloise Quiñones-Keber, eds. Mixteca-Puebla: Discoveries and Research in Mesoamerican Art and Archaeology (Culver City, CA: Labyrinthos, 1994); John M. D. Pohl. “Ritual and Iconographic Variability in Mixteca-Puebla Polychrome Pottery,” in The Postclassic Mesoamerican World, edited by Frances Berdan (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003); Karl Taube, “At Dawn’s Edge: Tulúm, Santa Rita, and Floral Symbolism in the International Style,” in Astronomers, Scribes, and Priests: Intellectual Interchange between the Northern Maya Lowlands and Highland Mexico in the Late Postclassic Period, edited by Gabrielle Vail and Christine Hernández, 145–191 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010).

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Re-Indigenizing Ancient Mexican Glyphic Codices 4 Elizabeth Hill Boone, Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 33–35. 5 Elizabeth Hill Boone and Michael E. Smith, “Postclassic International Styles and Symbol Sets,” in The Postclassic Mesoamerican World, edited by Michael E. Smith and Frances F. Berdan, 186–193 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003). 6 John M.D. Pohl, “Introduction,” in Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan and the Heroes of Ancient Oaxaca: Reading History in the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, by Robert Lloyd Williams, 1–25 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 4. 7 Anne Cassidy, “Divination by Image: The Borgia Group of Pre-Hispanic Mexican Manuscripts.” PhD dissertation (Columbia, 2004), 98–113. 8 Gordon Whittaker, Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs: A Guide to Nahuatl Writing, 1st ed. (­Oakland: University of California Press, 2021); Alfonso Lacadena, “Regional Scribal Traditions: Methodological Implications for the Decipherment of Nahuatl Writing,” The PARI Journal 8, no. 4 (Spring 2008): 1–22. 9 Gordon Whittaker, Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs: A Guide to Nahuatl Writing, 1st ed. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), 135. 10 Alfonso Lacadena, “Regional Scribal Traditions: Methodological Implications for the Decipherment of Nahuatl Writing,” The PARI Journal 8, no. 4 (Spring 2008): 2. 11 Gordon Whittaker, Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs: A Guide to Nahuatl Writing, 1st ed. (­Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), 172. 12 Alfonso Lacadena, “Regional Scribal Traditions: Methodological Implications for the Decipherment of Nahuatl Writing,” The PARI Journal 8, no. 4 (Spring 2008): 18. 13 Elizabeth Hill Boone, “Aztec Pictorial Histories: Records without Words,” in Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, edited by Elizabeth Boone and ­Walter Mignolo, 50–76 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 1994), 54. 14 Federico Navarrete, “Writing, Images, and Time-Space in Aztec Monuments and Books,” in Their Way of Writing: Scripts, Signs, and Pictographies in Pre-Columbian America, editied by Elizabeth Boone and Gary Urton, 175–195 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2011), 177. 15 Gordon Whittaker, Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs: A Guide to Nahuatl Writing, 1st ed. (­Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), 24–25. 16 Ibid., 25–26. 17 Bernardino de Sahagún, Arthur J. O. Anderson, and Charles E. Dibble, trans., Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, 12 vols. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950–1982), 11,78. 18 Bernardino de Sahagún, Arthur J. O. Anderson, and Charles E. Dibble, trans., Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, 12 vols. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950–1982), 3, 72. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 3:73. 21 Alonso de Molina, “Pocyo,” Online Nahuatl Dictionary, Wood, Stephanie, ed. (Eugene, OR: Wired Humanities Projects, College of Education, University of Oregon, 2000–present). https:// nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/pocyo. 22 Bernardino de Sahagún, Arthur J. O. Anderson, and Charles E. Dibble, trans., Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, 12 vols. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950–1982), 10, 9. 23 “amatl,” Online Nahuatl Dictionary, Wood, Stephanie, ed. (Eugene, OR: Wired Humanities Projects, College of Education, University of Oregon, 2000–present). https://nahuatl.wired-­ ­ humanities.org/content/amatl. 24 Bernardino de Sahagún, Arthur J. O. Anderson, and Charles E. Dibble, trans. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, 12 vols. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950–1982), 11, 28. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 5:7. 27 Ibid., 9:49. 28 Ibid., 9:45. 29 Ibid., 9:47.

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Felicia Rhapsody Lopez 30 Ibid., 12:85. 31 Frances Karttunen, “Cuicuiltic,” Online Nahuatl Dictionary, Wood, Stephanie, ed. (Eugene, OR: Wired Humanities Projects, College of Education, University of Oregon, 2000–present). https:// nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cuicuiltic. 32 Gordon Whittaker, Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs: A Guide to Nahuatl Writing, 1st ed. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021). 33 Mercedes Montes de Oca Vega, Los Difrasismos en el Náhuatl del Siglo XVI (Mexico City: UNAM, 2000), 253–56; Katarzyna Mikulska Dąbrowska. “‘Secret Language’ in Oral and Graphic Form: Religious-Magic Discourse in Aztec Speeches and Manuscripts,” Oral Tradition 25, no. 2 (2010): 336. 34 Frances Karttunen, “Tlahuizcalli,” Online Nahuatl Dictionary, Wood, Stephanie, ed. (Eugene, OR: Wired Humanities Projects, College of Education, University of Oregon, 2000–present). https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlahuizcalli. 35 Gordon Whittaker, Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs: A Guide to Nahuatl Writing, 1st ed. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021); Alfonso Lacadena, “Regional Scribal Traditions: Methodological Implications for the Decipherment of Nahuatl Writing,” The PARI Journal 8, no. 4 (Spring 2008): 1–22.

Selected Bibliography Boone, Elizabeth Hill. “Aztec Pictorial Histories: Records without Words.” In Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, edited by Elizabeth Boone and ­Walter Mignolo, 50–76. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 1994. Boone, Elizabeth Hill, and Michael E. Smith. “Postclassic International Styles and Symbol Sets.” In The Postclassic Mesoamerican World, edited by Michael E. Smith and Frances F. Berdan, 186–193. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003. Cassidy, Anne. “Divination by Image: The Borgia Group of Pre-Hispanic Mexican Manuscripts.” PhD dissertation, New York: Columbia University, 2004. Dąbrowska, Katarzyna Mikulska. “‘Secret Language’ in Oral and Graphic Form: Religious Magic Discourse in Aztec Speeches and Manuscripts.” Oral Tradition 25, no. 2 (2010): 325–363. Lacadena, Alfonso. “Regional Scribal Traditions: Methodological Implications for the Decipherment of Nahuatl Writing.” The PARI Journal 8, no. 4 (Spring 2008): 1–22. Navarrete, Federico. “Writing, Images, and Time-Space in Aztec Monuments and Books.” In Their Way of Writing: Scripts, Signs, and Pictographies in Pre-Columbian America, editied by Elizabeth Boone and Gary Urton, 175–195. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2011. Pohl, John M. D. “Introduction.” In Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan and the Heroes of Ancient Oaxaca: Reading History in the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, by Robert Lloyd Williams, 1–25. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Sahagún, Bernardino de, Arthur J. O. Anderson, and Charles E. Dibble, trans. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain. 12 vols. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950–1982. Sahagún, Bernardino de, Thelma D Sullivan, and H. B Nicholson, trans. Primeros Memoriales. ­Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, 1999. Taube, Karl. “At Dawn’s Edge: Tulúm, Santa Rita, and Floral Symbolism in the International Style.” In Astronomers, Scribes, and Priests: Intellectual Interchange between the Northern Maya Lowlands and Highland Mexico in the Late Postclassic Period, edited by Gabrielle Vail and Christine Hernández, 145–191. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010. Whittaker, Gordon. Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs: A Guide to Nahuatl Writing. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021.

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19 (NOT) PERFORMING PASIFIKA INDIGENEITY Destabilizing the Researcher as Decolonizing Method in Art History Amelia Jones This story begins in February 2018. I’ve only just arrived in Auckland, Aotearoa New ­Zealand, for a five-month stint as a Fulbright scholar, to complete the research and writing for a book on queer performance genealogies; I am with my partner, who is Pākehā, the name Māori people give to white New Zealanders.1 As a representative of the US government I am a state-sponsored carrier of the virus of US queer and performance theory. Fortuitously, it’s Auckland Pride week, and numerous performances aligned with Western LGBTQ cultural ideas—not surprising since Gay Pride was invented in the US—are being presented. My partner and I attend as many as we can. The first we attend is a performance event by the queer South Auckland collective FAFSWAG at the Auckland Art Gallery.2 Ushered along through the gallery with hundreds of other spectators, we are led to an upper-level terrace facing Albert Park, where a large screen at the far end shows footage of FAFSWAG, their bodies galivanting across the luminous screen; they appear genderqueer from a US point of view, bodies of all sizes in campy “ballroom” outfits, doing voguing moves. Milling around is a mix of mostly white (art-world?) but also many Pasifika (of Pacific Island descent, but living in Aotearoa) and Māori people. Many among the crowd are, according to Western norms, gender indeterminate or flagrantly genderqueer people, some in outlandish outfits, including several of the FAFSWAG members identifiable from the filmed performance. Anticipation builds as we all begin to cluster in two groups on either side of a strip of ground that seems to be turning into a catwalk. Suddenly the energy shifts as the charismatic Akashi Fisi’inaua (stage name Akashi), the primary FAFSWAG vogue ball MC or “chanter,” explodes onto the scene. In beige harem pants, black bustier, spike heels, and slicked back wavy black hair with blond highlights, this gorgeous self-identified transwoman struts up and down the ad hoc catwalk.3 In a mix of what seems to be rap, hip-hop banter, and auctioneering patter, in English and some Pacific Island language I do not recognize (I find out later that she is originally from Tonga), she electrifies the crowd and leads the way for a series of voguers twirling, duck walking, cat walking, punching, framing, kicking, spinning and dipping, and flipping their hands and arms down the runway4—first FAFSWAG members and other apparent pros, followed by more amateur performers participating in an open competition. 263

DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-23

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A few days later, my partner and I see another FAFSWAG performance, also part of Pride Week, this time at the War Memorial Museum (WMM; also called Auckland ­Museum); the WMM is the city’s major natural history museum—the colonizers’ venue built for the “­artifacts” made by Indigenous people.5 In both the art and ethnographic venues in Auckland, the dramatically live bodies of FAFSWAG performers made an impact, negotiating European/Pākehā constructions from different directions. The FAFSWAG event in the WMM was staged after a panel called “Explicit Inclusion Identity” (February 14, 2018) on trans rights, using the Western term—which included queer Pasifika, Māori, and Pākehā spokespeople such as the first trans mayor in the world, Georgina Beyer.6 After the panel, we were led through the darkened halls of the WMM, where reside impressive Māori monuments, such as an entire marae (meeting house) and a waka (large canoe) as well as Māori and Pasifika ritual objects—all presented as artifacts. Again Akashi MC’s the voguing but in this case some of the performers wear grass skirts and shell necklaces and perform Pacific Island dance moves. Here FAFSWAG makes Pasifika and Māori bodies present and active, enlivening the colonial ethnographic space of the dead artifact (Figure 19.1). With the two performances, FAFSWAG infiltrated both art and natural history museums in a city founded by white colonizers. Their live bodies can be seen as combining radically nonconforming gender/sex modes of embodiment to challenge the differing temporalities assigned to cultures: European (forever progressing, its subjects capable of making “art”) and Pasifika and Māori (forever in the “past,” producing only never-changing “artifacts,” which are useful rather than aesthetic). Through these two events, by asserting themselves as alive, FAFSWAG shifts the meaning of cultural identity, queerness, performance, even arguably history itself.

*****

As inspired by the performing bodies of FAFSWAG, this text implicitly seeks to decolonize not only methods and assumptions structuring art history but equally those underlying performance studies, queer theory, and white-dominant Western ideas about art and performance and knowledge tout court. But of course, there are major problems with such a project. First, attempting to decolonize disciplines and practices that are fundamentally Euro-American (art history, performance studies, art, and performance) through a method and language (academic analysis, English) that are themselves implicated in colonialism is a fraught if not impossible enterprise. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have famously put it, “decolonization is not a metaphor,” and generally “recenters whiteness” when it is used in such a way rather than as a literal return of stolen land.7 But I would argue for looking at the problem differently. Rather than assume decolonization is a wholesale project, an idea that relies on a brute opposition between colonizer and colonized, what if we stress the fact of the reciprocity of cultural power and meaning? The case of Aotearoa begs for a different view if we note that Māori culture and thinking has been central to both European/colonizing and decolonizing (arguably anti- or counter-European) modes of understanding since contact, or at least since the original publication in 1925 of Marcel Mauss’s research on the “gift,” for which his second-hand understandings of Māori customs and beliefs provided key examples.8 So, if European thought is always already Māori, then maybe I have metaphorical ground to stand on in at least hazarding a self-reflexive critique of the colonizing force of scholarly (here art historical/performance studies) method. Arguably, with Mauss as an example, the impact on European thought of Polynesian mores and culture in general and Māori ideas in particular has been profound and pervasive 264

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Figure 19.1  FAFSWAG performance for “explicit exclusion identity” event at Auckland War ­Memorial Museum/ Tāmaki Paenga Hisa Auckland, February 14, 2018; photograph by Amelia Jones.

since the initial encounters between European and Māori peoples in the seventeenth century.9 Māori and European thought have cross-fertilized, and it is clear that the Māori have had a huge role—vastly disproportionate in terms of their actual numbers—in conditioning both European and decolonial modes of knowledge. Not to mention the fact that one of the key early texts in decolonial theory is the 1999 book Decolonizing Methodologies by Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith. This book pointedly calls for at least an impulse of decolonizing, noting the resistance to postcolonial theory amongst many Indigenous peoples 265

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“because post-colonialism is viewed as the convenient invention of Western intellectuals which reinscribes their power to define the world.”10 While, as many have suggested, decolonizing (as a complete reversal of power and land ownership) is strictly speaking impossible, in a general sense because colonization can never be reversed (this would involve going back in time, decoupling mixed families, dismantling cities and industries), and in a specific sense, for someone like me, raised in more or less European traditions, since we tend to labor to decolonize through writing and teaching in European languages and disciplines and institutions. Even Tuhiwai Smith is clear on this point, and aware of the paradox of writing a scholarly book in English on decolonizing methodologies (she notes that one might view the book as “an anti-research book on research”).11 But ignoring calls for decolonization is to accept the colonialist and post-colonial status quo; it is infinitely worse in that it accedes to European ways of doing and thinking without challenge. Motivated by this desire to work against or in open consideration of these double binds, desiring to undo assumptions embedded in queer theory and performance studies as well as art history, I successfully argued on my Fulbright application that I needed to live in a place with a strong Indigenous presence in society and government and a vocal Indigenous critique of what Okui Enwezor called “Westernism,” “that sphere of global totality that manifests itself through the political, social, economic, cultural, juridical, and spiritual integration achieved via institutions devised and maintained solely to perpetuate the influence of European and North American modes of being,” asserting itself as “the only viable idea of social, political, and cultural legitimacy from which modern subjectivities are seen to emerge.”12 (Although in using the term “Indigenous” in relation to Aotearoa, it is important to note that Tuhiwai Smith favors the Māori term tengata whenau [or people of the land], working against the tendency in Euro-American thought to lump together all Indigenous people since it “appears to collectivize many distinct populations whose experiences under imperialism have been vastly different.”)13 To fulfill the goals of my research project, once I arrived in Aotearoa, I viewed as many performances by FAFSWAG and other Māori and Pasifika performers, often trans or queer identified, as possible and threw myself into discussions with them when I could. Two months after the performances I describe above, I even joined a performance workshop with FAFSWAG that was illuminating, as much because of what this taught me about the limits of my understanding as because of what I learned from FAFSWAG members about their project.

******

Before that workshop, however, I reached for my tools, and tried to figure out FAFSWAG through an academic approach. I started by researching voguing, since my knowledge was based in US-dominant queer theory (the very discourse I was hoping to critically historicize) and thus limited to the ubiquitous debates around the 1990 Jennie Livingston film Paris Is Burning, which documented New York’s underground voguing scene. Most agree that this dance/performance form as we currently know it originated in the 1980s in New York City among African American and Latinx drag queens, adopting gestures and moves from a range of sources including Vogue magazine style shoots, fashion runway modeling, breakdancing, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.14 Expanding on strategies common to the New York ball scene from earlier years, these communities established alternative families, gathering in “houses,” run by “mothers,” just as those in the Auckland voguing scene do today (FAFSWAG, whose members are largely from a mostly 266

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Pasifika/Māori and economically depressed part of the city called South Auckland or Māngere, acts as a kind of alternative “house”). As DJ and scholar madison moore elaborates in their book Fabulous, the catwalk or voguing runway is about “self-assertion, creativity, ownership, and fierceness”; these events are spaces “to demand self-worth,” sites for the “fierce” performance of self by members of “queer and brown communities, disempowered groups that make their own culture” to assert agency and “crack … open normativity.”15 Despite this relentless flirtation with “realness” and “authenticity,” voguing in the US context was also appropriated by US academic queer theory as a constitutive example of the performativity of gender as a “discourse” that merges hybrid elements from diverse cultures and forms of embodiment. In the highly influential work of Judith Butler on gender performance, she thus looks to voguing—specifically via the film Paris Is Burning—for this theory, situating the original expression of gender as a performance in New York City.16 In Butler’s model, which became dominant, one could say voguing paradoxically makes the “realness” of queer or trans gender/sex identifications performative (as José Esteban Muñoz asserts, “[q]ueerness is … a performative” because of its “ideality” and futurity, its “insistence on potentiality”),17 exposing the impossibility of securing gender/sex in any stable form. Even in its US modes, voguing was by the early 1990s thus already arguably “colonized” by white pop superstar Madonna, in her 1990 song and music video “Vogue,” but also in academia; some accused Butler of appropriation of the subcultural and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) voguing performances in her theory of gender performance.18 By the late 1990s into the 2000s, the connection between a sublimated version of queer transfemininity (via voguing) was sutured to increasingly populist concepts of gender performance or performativity. Lost was a sense of the difficulties or precarity faced by the actual members of voguing communities-of-color in 1980s or early 1990s New York City—a shift exemplified by the massification of genderqueer in television shows such as RuPaul’s Drag Race and Pose. Despite all these caveats, most importantly that of the narrowness of this version of queer and performance theory, which pivots around specific forms of queer/trans performance in New York City during a brief period of time, it still seemed impossible not to extend these concepts to FAFSWAG’s practice. In talking to the members and listening to them speak at public events, it became clear that they self-consciously appropriate US forms of voguing via versions of it they access via YouTube videos or even directly from Paris Is Burning, which circulates widely online. For example, FAFSWAG member Roy Aati specified in an interview their attraction to the New York model of voguing (which they noted they would copy from videos online): “everyone in Paris is Burning had this bit of a lost soul and found themselves through the ballroom scene … seemed like they walked the same path as I did.”19 FAFSWAG members talk openly about how they are also inspired by the prevalence of African American-style hip hop in South Auckland in the 1990s and elaborate their style of voguing as a mode of self-empowerment for oppressed communities in South Auckland, effectively binding elements from these sources in US Black and Latinx urban dance cultures with gestures and modes of embodiment that, in this case, are Polynesian.20 In this way, FAFSWAG’s practice is queer in a Western sense but also highly specific. FAFSWAG forms as it also expresses a self-identified queer and trans community figuring out a way to survive in Pākehā-dominant institutions, but also with reference to Māori and Pasifika modes of gender/sex identification and ritual.21 267

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Tanu Gago, a leading figure in and co-founder of the collective, has noted the crucial i­mportance of FAFSWAG as an alternative “family,” a locus of bonding and mutual support where gender liminal people rejected by their original families and/or by their communities or New Zealand society as a whole find common purpose. It is a site where bodies are activated to articulate new forms of agency: Gago noted in a 2017 interview, “body sovereignty is a really important issue … the body [is] the last place people have control.”22 In South Auckland, Gago has asserted, “until ‘trans lives matter,’ they didn’t matter,” and thus a key goal of FAFSWAG has been to provide visibility and a community for its members to articulate empowered forms of trans embodiment.23 For a group such as FAFSWAG, these modes of trans identification clearly cross into Pacific Indigenous, and pre-colonial, identifications such as the fa’afafine (in Sāmoa) and takatāpui (among the Māori). Generally speaking, these terms describe people with anatomically male bodies who identify as female through taking on household tasks associated with women in their societies and/or dressing and behaving as women—fa’afafine means literally “in the manner of a woman.” But each term has a range of meanings in its culture. Attending to the infinitely complex relation between Māori and European or Pākehā culture is key in understanding non-normative gender as it plays out in Aotearoa. Michelle Elleray (who identifies as a Māori lesbian and takatāpui—here, in the sense of a person with an intimate relationship with someone of the same sex) notes, Maori are necessarily bicultural—both tangata whenau (Indigenous peoples) and Westerners, saddled with the task of translating themselves between those two ­designations—so the Maori lesbian may be both part of a community of Maori women attracted to one another, and part of the Western gay and lesbian movements.24 This situation as Elleray describes it clearly shows the impact of Western ideas about LGBTQ identity and activism, but also demonstrates the ways in which European thought and society—including ideas about gender and sexuality—have been shaped by colonial encounters. In a brilliant 2003 book Sexual Encounters, Pākehā scholar Lee Wallace makes this argument on a theoretical register, noting that the “discovery” of Polynesian gender/sex complexities on the part of British sailors “redefined the possibilities for sexual variance within European masculinity.”25 Wallace compellingly asserts the interrelation of European and Pacific structures in the constitution of what Europeans call gender/sex identification and in fact of the entire (European) concept of homosexuality: It is warranted to speak not of a Polynesian sexuality or a Western sexuality but of a shared Pacific sexuality that takes its shape and volatility from a geographic and discursive field twice crossed by the histories of homosexual difference and cultural exchange…. Male homosexuality, such as we have come to understand it, was constituted in no small part through the European collision with Polynesian culture.26 Wallace asserts that the Euro-American concept of homosexuality, which Michel Foucault establishes as having come into being around 1800, was constituted through Europeans’ contact with gender liminal Polynesians in the century before.27 Wallace elaborates this key point by examining a number of the historical European texts describing initial encounters with Pacific peoples in the eighteenth century, several of which note the shocking 268

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appearance of feminine people (first perceived as female) who turn out to possess male anatomy (in some cases flaunting their penises to shocked Europeans, apparently for a laugh).28 These “discoveries” turned Europeans’ concept of sexuality and gender roles inside out and Wallace insists that we attend to their role in constituting the binaries of hetero/homosexual and male/female that served at the time to condition and justify colonial domination. Wallace thus argues that we address “the relation of heterosexual metaphorization to the justification of the power relations of empire.”29 From my experience and in my interpretation, FAFSWAG’s work epitomizes this dual move of embracing Māori and Pasifika modes of bodily identification (always already shaped through colonization) while also explicitly appropriating Western forms of gender/sex identity and performance (themselves conditioned through encounters with Pacific peoples). Performance, with live and agential bodies, is a key activator of this interrelation, enabling a negotiation of the circuits of power and agency between colonizer and colonized. FAFSWAG member Moe Laga thus noted at the workshop, “performance is a tool of escaping to another world where I’m allowed to do whatever the fuck I want.”30 And Akashi has made clear the drive to draw on voguing and a politics specific to the Pasifika queer community to counter the racist, sexist, and homophobic status quo in her description of FAFSWAG’s goal as “fucking up the patriarchy one Caucasian space at a time.”31 Akashi performs with a body habitus informed by Tongan-Pasifika but also urban Western queer/ trans performance culture; her voguing moves inevitably draw on Tongan ritual gestures and modes of embodiment as (in her words) a “way of letting go of trauma” through performance, where one can “hold complexity” and embrace a “place of unbalancedness [which] is where the juice is.”32

*******

Long after Pride Week was over, in mid-April, I committed myself to attending an all-day event at Q Theatre in Auckland called “Attack the Block!,” featuring FAFSWAG members on a series of panels and leading workshops. Two morning panels—on “Representation and Agency” and on “Community and Collective Practice”—were illuminating in relation to the group’s collective desire, as Gago put it, to create an alternative “shared space” to counter isolation among queer young people in Auckland’s Pasifika and Māori communities. On the panel, Gago noted that the word “queer” and other “Western” terms are used by the group because “otherwise it doesn’t make sense,” seemingly implying that, without these appropriations, their work wouldn’t translate to the white dominant communities of Auckland and beyond. He described the group’s interest in the Pacific concept of “­Talanoa,” a Fijian and Pasifika word for being in dialogue or “hashing things out”—and other participants on the panel elaborated this point: rather than “gatekeeping,” fighting over terms and turf, the essence of FAFSWAG is “sharing.”33 After lunch, I attended the voguing workshop lead by Akashi Fisi’inaua and Elyssia Wilson-Heti, along with three others: two University of Auckland art students (identified only as Ara and Honor), and a FAFSWAG member, Jaycee Tanuvasa. I was seriously intimidated by Tanuvasa and Akashi, as they knew what to do; I was also the oldest by decades. The two leaders brought us into a large open room, where the only noticeable item was a table at one end covered with objects, the significance of which would be revealed later. We started by standing in a circle, and Akashi asked us to describe our relationship to our bodies, in private as well as public spaces. We learned that Akashi and Jaycee self-identify as Pasifika and as transwomen, Elyssia as a “fat” cis Pasifika woman; Ara described herself in 269

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terms of her Māori background and sense of empowerment in relation to that space. Honor and I, as the only white-identified women, seemed to me to be the most self-conscious, almost cringing as we conveyed a sense of not belonging. I spoke of being an older woman who has gone through menopause and has experienced suddenly becoming invisible in public spaces, dismissed as no longer signalling sexual potential to heterosexual men—this generated sympathetic comments from Akashi. We then warmed up with a series of physical exercises with Wilson, and then ritualistically built an “altar” by placing objects from the table—including plastic flowers, candles, several superhero posters, and pieces of paper framed as pictures with the names of inspiring, and notably American, women of color written on them, including Kimberlé Crenshaw, Queen Latifah, and Audre Lorde. We then all held hands before the completed altar and Akashi led us to breathe in the power of us women standing in the space, to breathe out self-doubt. I felt joined in solidarity to these women (of all body types). Akashi’s kindness allowed me momentarily to get over my shattered sense of vulnerability in this foreign country and foreign space, among younger and culturally different folks, trying to perform (instead of just examining others’ performances). We moved into Akashi’s part of the event, where she mentored us through a series of voguing movements, and whatever positive sense of connectedness I was feeling collapsed. I had never felt so old, confused, and incompetent—not the least at performing a kind of hyper-femininity to which I have never felt I have access. I would get one gesture, albeit only in a mechanical sense, but then find myself increasingly lost as I tried to put the moves together in a sequence. With Akashi instructing us to use these movements to exorcise our rage toward someone who had mistreated us as women, I became completely flummoxed and flustered—I couldn’t seem to combine feelings with bodily gestures that multiplied one on another. I kept it together and just kept going, even when we faced each other for a dance-off and I was hopeless, failing to keep the moves in time, or in sequence. My sense of complete disorientation from being in Aotearoa, seemingly at the literal (geographical) end of my known world, was suddenly actualized in my utter failure to perform as a “woman” in relation to Akashi’s gorgeous and accomplished modes of rage-fueled feminine embodiment. I simply could not successfully embody Akashi’s feminine gestures, mimic her brash and sexy mojo. Far from seeing Akashi’s womanliness as a travesty, an unfair appropriation of the feminine, as some trans-exclusionary feminists have unfortunately tended to view transfemale people, however, I was all the more impressed with her triumph. She clearly fully possesses this version of the feminine: she does it so much better than I. (Although without a doubt, she must navigate social spaces that are dangerous for her, whereas, an aging white woman, I can get by as particularly invisible now that I have gone through the change.34)

******

By putting myself in the position of attempting to do what I had been ethnographically studying from afar as a spectator, I dehabituated myself from my bodily habitus, bringing on acute discomfort. As Pierre Bourdieu notes of the habitus, it “tends to favour experiences likely to reinforce [the person’s sense of self …] to protect itself from crises and critical challenges by providing itself with a milieu to which it is as pre-adapted as possible … tending to reinforce its dispositions.”35 It is precisely this rupture of the habitus—in my case, of the “Westernisms” of normative sex/gender, North Americanness, cis-femininity, middleclassness, educational privilege, and whiteness—that provided the destabilizing force to 270

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shift my thinking away from appropriation and domination and toward a more relational understanding of what FAFSWAG is doing. This experience provided a personal lesson, but also on reflection has wider ramifications for an ethical scholarship that attempts to decolonize, encouraging a look at what it means for a person identified with the habitus of the dominant ruling class to be put in an environment where she/he is vulnerable, subordinate, and potentially irrelevant to the cultural experience at hand. Knowing, and accepting, that my failure was not, and should not be, Akashi’s concern, made it all the more destabilizing of my certainty as a Western scholar—were my frames of knowledge valid? The limits of my body pointed to the limits of my knowledge and potential understanding. If, as Tuck and Yang suggest, decolonization is not a metaphor, then it must at the very least get at the structural levels of oppression and discrimination. If not returning the land itself (as they call for), at the very least, as a white, Western member of the academy and the settler class, putting myself in a position of weakness, failure, and vulnerability, a position of otherness, at least opened the door for me to understand how little I could understand and know.

Notes 1 Aotearoa is the Māori name for the land mass named New Zealand by colonizers and map makers from Europe who first made contact in the mid seventeenth century. The book became In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (London and New York: Routledge Press, 2021), and this chapter is taken from Chapter 7, “Trans,” 298–349. 2 The event took place February 7, 2018. Some members of FAFSWAG use the terms “trans” and “queer” in interviews and both terms appear on their website (see https://FAFSWAG.com/ FAFSWAG/); this does not mean that every member of the group is comfortable with the terms. The information on FAFSWAG throughout this text is from a variety of sources, including the workshops and talks and performances noted throughout, brief conversations with Tanu Gago and Akashi Fisi’inaua throughout my stay; with Pasifika-Sāmoan artist Yuki Kihara (April 1, 2018); with Edward Cowley aka “Buckwheat,” a legendary Auckland drag queen (April 7, 2018); and scholars and curators familiar with FAFSWAG’s work, in particular Caroline Vercoe, Lisa Taouma, and Nina Tonga. 3 She identified herself as a trans woman at the FAFSWAG event “Attack the Block,” Q Theatre, Auckland, April 14, 2018. 4 For the terms I am indebted to “Los Angeles-Lists: A GIF Guide to Voguing (+ Short History),” http:// www.standardhotels.com/culture/a-gif-guide-to-voguing--short-history; accessed June 7, 2018. 5 See Caroline Vercoe, “Art,” in The Pacific Islands: Environment and Society, Moshe Rapaport, ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013), 236–247. Vercoe points out that the Europrean catagories are incommensurate with creative practices in the Pacific: “Western fine art objects are generally made to be displayed in art galleries or museums. They are seldom touched or worn. The majority of art forms produced within the Pacific, however, are made specifically to be functional within particular ceremonies, events, or performances,” 237. 6 As identified in the program, the other participants were Victor Rodger (a gay playwright of Sāmoan and European descent), Lexie Matheson (a Pākehā trans person), Nikolai Talamahina (a transgender musician of Niuean and Sāmoan descent), and Aych McArdle (who identifies as a “gender diverse person)”. 7 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, n. 1 (2012), 3. 8 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925), trans. W.D. Halls (London: Routledge, 2002); see especially “The Spirit of the Thing Given (Maori),” 13–16. 9 See Anne Salmond, Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2018).

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Amelia Jones 10 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, and London and New York: Zed Books, 1999), 14. 11 Ibid., 16. 12 Okwui Enwezor, “The Black Box,” Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition (Kassel: Documenta; and Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002), 45–46. 13 Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 6. 14 See madison moore, “What’s Queer About the Catwalk?,” Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 167–216. See also Marcos Becquer and Jose Gatti’s very helpful “Elements of Vogue,” Third Text 5, n. 16–17 (Fall 1991), 65–81. 15 moore, “What’s Queer about the Catwalk?,” 173, 179, 170, 185. 16 See Butler’s “Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion,” Chapter 4 in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 121–141. 17 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 1. 18 See my discussion of critiques of Butler in In Between Subjects, 172 and 204–205. 19 Roy Aati, in “Zealandia: New Zealand’s Underground Vogue Scene,” Vice video documentary on Youtube, posted May 7, 2017; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOeAU66IRPk. 20 At “Attack the Block.” 21 Per Fisi’inaua, the voguing scene in Auckland started in the schools (implicitly, private boys schools): the “rugby boys” would vogue “after sucking dick”; see Akashi Fisi’inaua in “Zealandia.” 22 Tanu Gago in “Pacific Bodies: Tanu Gago,” interviewed on the occasion of “The Body Laid Bare: Masterpieces from Tate,” at Auckland Art Gallery, August 10, 2017; https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gNOWq6Xs7xs 23 Gago at “Attack the Block.” 24 Michelle Elleray, “Weaving the Wahine Takatāpui,” Queer in Aotearoa New Zealand, Lynne Alice and Lynne Star, eds. (Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore Press, ltd., 2004), 177; see also Alison J. Laurie, ed., Lesbian Studies in Aotearoa/New Zealand (New York and London: Harrington Park Press, 2001). 25 Lee Wallace, Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 1. 26 Ibid., 7, 8. 27 See Foucault’s, History of Sexuality, volume 1: An Introduction (1978), trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980). 28 Niko Besnier, for example, describes a 1789 English account of encountering a Tahitian māhū (“this supposed damsel, when stripped of her theatrical paraphanelia [sic], [was shown to be] a dapper lad”) and the Tahitians laughing at the Europeans’ shock, see “Polynesian Gender Liminality Through Time and Space,” Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, ed. Gilbert Herdt (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 291–292. 29 Wallace, Sexual Encounters, 25, 26. 30 Moe Laga at “Attack the Block.” 31 Fisi’inaua, in “Zealandia.” 32 Fisi’inaua at “Attack the Block.” On the habitus as theorized by Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu in relation to performance bodies, see my essay “Habits are Hard to Break: The Habitus and Performance,” in Amelia Jones and Marin Blazevic, eds., special section “The Voice of Death, Rupturing the Habitus,” Performance Research 19, n. 3 (2014), 140–143. 33 Tanu Gago and curator Ema Tavola and FAFSWAG member Jermaine Dean on “Community and Collective Practice” panel, “Attack the Block!” 34 Akashi’s FaceBook posts are full of mentions of the struggle of a transwoman to walk freely in public space, and assertions of her pride in doing so nonetheless My favorite recent post is “my presence only becomes controversial and an issue to you because you refuse to see me until I’m right down the barrel purring at you like a kitty kat. Meaowww,” September 10, 2018; her kitty identification is revealed in her Instagram handle: “queen-kapussi.” 35 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (1934), trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford ­University Press, 1990), 61.

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Selected Bibliography Alice, Lynne and Lynne Star, ed. Queer in Aotearoa New Zealand. Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore Press, Ltd., 2004. Besnier, Niko. “Polynesian Gender Liminality Through Time and Space,” in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, ed. Gilbert Herdt. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Pages 285–566. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice (1934), tr. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Enwezor, Okwui. “The Black Box,” in Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition. Kassel: Documenta; and Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002. pp. 42–55. FAFSWAG website: https://FAFSWAG.com/FAFSWAG/ Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality, volume 1: An Introduction (1978), trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. Jones, Amelia. “Habits Are Hard to Break: The Habitus and Performance,” in ed. Amelia Jones and Marin Blazevic, special section “The Voice of Death, Rupturing the Habitus,” Performance Research 19, n. 3 (2014), 140–143. Jones, Amelia. In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance. London and New York: Routledge Press, 2021. Laurie, Alison J., ed. Lesbian Studies in Aotearoa/New Zealand. New York and London: Harrington Park Press, 2001. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925), trans. W.D. Halls. London: Routledge, 2002. moore, madison. Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press, 2009. Salmond, Anne. Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2018. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, and London and New York: Zed Books, 1999. Vercoe, Caroline. “Art,” in The Pacific Islands: Environment and Society, ed. Moshe Rapaport. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013, Pages 236–247. Wallace, Lee. Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2003.

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20 AFTERLIVES/FUTURELIVES Imagining Mermaids and Recalling Ghost Dancing Roshini Kempadoo

This entry is written in the current moment in which the vitality of artworks and art interventions by Black and artists of color of majority world cultures, contribute significantly to transforming cultural and political landscapes. Many Western art institutions and spaces are remapping the cultural limits of national life, recognizing the idea of the racial calculus that is based on a cumulative practice of injustice. This calculation is based on centuries as an entrenched relationship to the signifier of “race” that continues to position Black lives as deeply devalued and inextricably linked to colonial violence. There was once a law concerning mermaids. My friend thinks it is a wondrous thing – that the British Empire was so thorough it had invented a law for everything. And in this law it was decreed: … – they would no longer belong to themselves. And maybe this is the problem with empires: how they have forced us to live in a world lacking mermaids – mermaids who understood that they simply were, and did not need permission to exist or to be beautiful.1 The extract by Jamaican writer Kei Miller and the ‘concern for mermaids’ prompts us to think and imagine differently the legacy of empire and its aftermath. It reminds us of the ways in which art can offer substantive transformative perspectives of our relationship to colonial histories and emboldens us to wade through the quagmire of how we might actively and creatively decolonialize our minds, bodies and imaginations, what we might mean by the term and how we might thoughtfully attend to its associated meanings.2 Recent examples include the accelerated change to curatorial perspectives of survey shows by art institutions such as the Tate’s exhibition Life Between Islands: CaribbeanBritish Art 1950s – Now (2021/2022);3 changes to the range of artists’ work in art biennials, being particularly attentive to work by women and artists from the Global South, including Thao Nguyen Phan, Sonia Boyce, Zineb Sedira, Belkis Ayón (1967–1999) and Jaider Esbell (1979–2021), contributing to the 2022 Venice Biennale;4 and radical challenges to create organizational shifts in convening visual art happenings such as in the case of the exhibition event of contemporary art Documenta, which takes place in Kassel, Germany, every five years. In 2022, Documenta 15 was convened by the Jakarta-based DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-24 274

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artists’ collective ruangrupa, with the aim to embed the values and ideas of lumbung “as an artistic and economic model.” Proposed and devised by the group, the word lumbung is an Indonesian term for both rice barn and the practice of community and sharing that takes place within it. In this sense, ruangrupa conceived of the potential for Documenta 15 to develop collective ways forward for artmaking based on principles of sharing, creating, common governance and environmental care.5 These artworks are created with intended agency by their makers, as forces for change in institutions, media ecologies and related audiences/readers. They provide a platform of critical engagement and intervention that “speaks” back to European centers of capital and empire. This entry explores such art practices particularly focused on those artists living and working in the Caribbean and of the Caribbean diaspora, as contributions and perspectives that expose the precarity of the present political climate and cultural moments, as critiques that speak to the sustenance of right-wing populism, geopolitical activism against injustices, white patriarchal structures, and the pandemic-related exacerbated relationships between the Global South and Western wealth.

Envisioning Afterlives in the Wake of Slow Violence and Land Occupation This entry aims to displace the dominance and conventionality of historical framing and chronological time associated with art history. It takes up the configurations offered by seminal Caribbean critics and artists including Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, Aubrey Williams and Antonio Benítez-Rojo to reflect on the ways in which spatiality, scenes and terrains are envisioned as emergent from slavery and indentureship and the ruinous land use of plantation economies and colonial power. Recent scholarship and artworks have centralized the aftermath of colonialism and slavery and its relationship to the current impact of the climate crisis, devastation of land resources, the status of endangered and precarious animal and botanical species, the resistance to change from fossil fuel extraction to sustainable energy use, rampant production of unsustainable goods and packaging, and the perpetuation of violence and weaponry created by war zones and militarization.6 I refer to Rob Nixon’s term “slow violence,” which he uses to conceive of ways environmental challenges’ particular impact on global southern landscapes are concealed by corporate media, and reveals in detail the work by environmental activists that counter this, including activism by Wangarĩ Maathai, Anrudhati Roy and Ken Saro-Wiwa. Nixon creates an interconnection between what we might see as Braudel’s notion of longue durée to explore the enduring, unspectacular time and invisibility of slow violence, noting “[v]iolence – above all environmental violence, needs to be seen and deeply considered – as a contest not only over space, or bodies, or labor, or resources, but also over time.”7 In the wake of plantation economies, and framing critical encounters as decolonial artistic methodologies seen in artworks, I recognize the slow violence of colonialism with its enduring legacy of infrastructural and brutal violence emergent from the plantationocene.8 Caribbean contemporary artists have significantly evoked, portrayed, intervened in and imaged the complex relationship between the presence and violence to Caribbean bodies, racialized through the hierarchical construct of colonial power and the landscape and space of the Caribbean archipelago.9 Shannon Alonzo’s artwork Subterranean Sentiments of Belonging (2020–2021) is a case in point, conceived as wall drawings using coal and graphite, a performance of creation and erasure and a subsequent video as an exhibition installation. On the wall she converges the spatiality of the plantation landscape, 275

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tools and laboring bodies with carnival figures symbolic as forms of facetiousness and as acts of embodied resistance and right. Her coal drawings onto white walls are partial renditions of figures emerging out of and yet intertwined in the violent order and brutality of the plantationocene. Partially envisioned and unfolding as it is being drawn allow the spectator and observer to linger on the granular details of cutlasses, arms, ruins of grand colonial building, stilts (associated with the Moko jumbie carnival characters), tree roots. There is a stickability, implantation in the Caribbean landscape – like the plantation sugar cane crop itself. Her video documentation captures Alonzo as she draws and erases. She too is labouring, stepping amidst a collection of coal pieces on the ground, evocative of the land destroyed and blistered when the cane field has been burnt and ready for harvesting.10 The work resonates with the introductory text to the 2017 exhibition catalogue Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago. Tatiana ­Flores and Michelle Stephens offer a formation of the Caribbean archipelago as a term to reflect on such artworks, partially emergent from Glissant’s concepts of relations, being an “analytical framework for approaching contemporary art … less a bounded or fragmented area and more as a geo-material and geo-historical assemblage of sea spaces and islands.”11 The geo-material and geo-historical assemblage has been configured through what Malcom Ferdinand describes as “colonization’s principal action: the act of inhabiting.” The common thread he suggests is that of “colonial inhabitation”12 inherent to occupying space, inhabiting space that is taken, extracted from others or where the terrain itself is violated (the mass production of crops such as sugar, coffee, cocoa, rice that constituted the plantation), in order to be inhabited. Kathryn Yusoff’s writing goes on to propose us to rethink geology in relation to race and colonial legacy and reflects on the earth as a resource of alchemy, materiality and elements, and understand geological knowledge as ‘white geology’ with the economies of whiteness negating the histories and presence of Black bodies.13 Christopher Cozier, artist, curator, mentor and a founding member of the arts collective Alice Yard, Port of Spain, offers a response to the aftermath of colonial inhabitation. In an interview he comments: The Caribbean is a place that we entered as property not as people but as property, we became subjects of the crown, and then we are now having a conversation about citizenship and participation. So that’s a hell of a journey in a relatively short space of time, … coming from a place where both bodies and the land were exploited for capital gain … it’s been a catalyst – look how much we have suffered – look at how much we have accomplished, or have done or how influential we have been.14 As Françoise Vergès notes, “we are working on the past that has not been repaired.”15 These artworks are not only working on the past, but also working in the present and the future. They are offered as assemblages of contested temporalities that disavow linearity and favor hybridized temporal spaces of convergence.

Envisioning Afterlives, Approximately and Contiguously Taking up a relational consideration of how visual elements may be juxtaposed and “read” against each other, in the book Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence and

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Location of the Caribbean Figure, I consider ways we might constitute Caribbean visual archive as a creolized relational process, a knowledge system and practice that acts and is imagined as a physical and metaphorical placeholder of narratives. Recognizing creolization as inherent to the Caribbean, I expand the term to create a more attentive use of the term/s creole/creolizing/creolization to acknowledge its instability and puts the term to work temporarily and progressively with specific Caribbean geopolitical formations and historical epistemologies in mind. In Creole in the Archive, creole is eschewed from the problematic history with the corporeal body as a descendant of the violent, sexual brutality of colonial miscegenation on the plantation. The monograph instead maps the progressive and more recent genealogy emerging from the independence movement particularly associated with English-speaking Caribbean nations. Creolization of visual archives extends beyond national representation, expression and material. I propose the term as a dynamic cultural visual practice and expression that includes contemporary visual artworks by Caribbean artists and offers a critical and complex association and intervention of national cultural narratives. Creolization in this sense contains elements of future imagining and artistic expression emergent from the past and posed as a hybrid practice and discourse. This contiguous archive of material, objects and spaces relies on knowledge of the past being seen alongside and in juxtaposition to contemporary Caribbean artworks that enact disruption and introduce an aesthetics of memories, recalling oral stories handed down and registering different perspectives of Caribbean terrains and spaces such as Rodell Warner’s Augumented Archive (2021), María Magdalena CamposPons’ Elevata (2002), Leasho Johnson’s series Sweet Sugarcane (2014) or Stacey Tyrell’s Dada’s Funeral (2002). The intention is to undo the aftermath of colonial structures of linear knowledge from official archives and consider the significance of memory evoked such as Nicole Awai’s artwork Asphaltum Glance (2013) of her memory in response to the iconic image of smell, feel and texture of the landscape and terrain of The Pitch Lake in La Brea, South Trinidad. The artwork was created whilst Awai was on the Alice Yard residency, June 2013, Trinidad. She used bituminous (asphaltum), black paint, acrylic paint, nail polish, graphite and soft pastel to create the installation. This artwork, she states, is not about the Pitch Lake but rather a personal response consisting of what has been evoked from its presence over time, through memory and past narratives as an imagined memory. Awai’s imagined rejuvenated memory collides with the act of her painting and practice in Alice Yard, whilst her laboring embeds the powerful and magical qualities of Trinidad’s economic resource of oil as a fossil fuel. Decolonial Caribbean artmaking and visuality responds to and emerges from the colonial configurations that Krista Thompson posed as tropicalization of the terrain and one where creolization, that is hybrid creations in the making, may be seen in archipelagic environments and terrains.16 It can then be specifically mobilized as emergent from the violence and trauma (embodied, metaphorical, symbolic) of colonization whilst also concerned with a concept to cut across and recover from their legacies.17 Glissant’s writings on forced or counter poetics and others including Kamau Brathwaite and Meryse Conde’s writings reflect the “drama of creolization.”18 As a liberatory expression it is more intuitive, less restrained in order to transcend a position rather than merely subverting it. Creolization as a creative practice then is deployed as a “site of power” and a site of resistance, which I argue, pertains to the structure, function and practice of Caribbean visuality with its contiguity and evocations of the Caribbean figure, her presence, image and location.

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Envisioning Afterlives, Contesting Perspectives and Creating Collective Approaches I am prompted by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih noting that: Decolonization requires a revolution in politics, thought and language, all simultaneously and it is much more than a reaction against colonialism. Rather it is an act of self-assertion and self-creation.19 Self-assertion and self-creation by Caribbean artists and those of the Caribbean diaspora through autobiography, portraiture, figurative and performative tropes contribute significantly to contemporary visual art. A visual sense of a Caribbean self in formation and in process, forever malleable, morphing and dynamic are seen in a range of works by ­Caribbean contemporary artists.20 Central to this is how Caribbean bodies might be stilled (imaged) and presenced at particular moments and in particular spaces. Such artworks, I propose, are created and emerge from feminist knowledge-making approaches that are situated, embodied and partial, developing perspectives that can never be known in advance but which promise extraordinary insight. “Vision is always a question of the power to see,” Haraway reminds us, whilst acknowledging the violence implicit in visualizing practices.21 Work of this kind confronts and pauses the tendency to naturalize colonial violence, instead we may consider the artworks, as Trinh T. Minh-ha proposes: For the people, by the people, and from the people is, literally, a multipolar reflecting reflection that remains free from the conditions of subjectivity and objectivity and yet reveals them both.22 In this way, making sense of contemporary artworks as visually situated, feminist sight in the Caribbean land and seascapes are significant to bringing into question the conventions associated with patriarchal ways of looking. The position from which we may speak, write and identify with – that is, as the racialized woman’s body makes her way in the world – is vital to constituting the artworks as emergent from decolonial discourse. This positionality is proposed to us by Françoise Vergès in the introduction to her book A Decolonial Feminism in which she relates the experience and protest organized by the women cleaners at Gare du Nord railway station Paris, in 2018. A decolonial feminism is necessary at this current juncture, in order to respond to, and act on the injustices and inequalities associated with the racialized woman’s figure stating: Capitalism inevitably creates invisible work and disposable lives …. It is on these precarious lives, these endangered lives, these worn-out bodies, that the comfortable life of the middle class and the world of the powerful ultimately rests.23 Other aspects come to light in recounting Françoise Vergès’s proposal of a decolonial feminism for this author engaging with Caribbean artworks. The first is to reflect on the inseparable link between racialization and capitalism that thinkers including Cedric R ­ obinson, Sylvia Wynter, Beverley Mullings and Denise Ferreira da Silva have, and continue to assert.24 And secondly, to consider collective work and struggle as inextricably linked to the practice of decolonization, thought and creativity. It is no coincidence then to find more radical collective and participatory work being done by artists in their work and through 278

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their relationships to the art institutions that are sustained by their creative effort. The arts event Documenta 15 (2022) has for the first time extended its remit internationally to cultural groups such as Alice Yard, Trinidad, noted earlier in this entry, to create and debate who and how culture is created and sustained. ruangrupa’s invitation is to community-­ oriented collectives, organizations and institutions to “practice lumbung with each other and work on new models of sustainability and collective practices of sharing.” Other examples of intervention and cultural activism include: monuments being brought down or daubed through collective protest such as Rhodes Must Fall, South Africa (2015), Christopher Columbus, Miami (2020), Empress Josephine and Pierre Bélain d’Esnambuc, Martinique (2020); monuments being proposed and created as more tentative, temporary artworks such as I Am Queen Mary created by La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers, ­Copenhagen (2018) or Hew Locke’s The Procession, Tate Britain, London (2022); art p ­ ractice as platforms for consciousness raising such as For Freedoms, the artist-run platform, US (2016-); and institutional challenges to the competitive practices embedded into the artmaking and curation process such as the artists Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar ­Murillo and Tai Shani proposing and being jointly awarded the Turner Prize, London (2019) as a collective. These artistic gestures, efforts, voices of protest and creativity allude to what ­Annie Paul has described as “alter natives,” as artists. Who are not interested in fostering a Caribbean aesthetic or promoting and supporting national agendas. The alter natives are the illegitimate children of the nation who by virtue of differing race, class, gender, or sexual variables find themselves on the wrong side of nation stories in opposition to the majority groups that assert ownership of the national or Caribbean space.25

Futurelives, Imagining a Sustainable Future This writing and perspective are set against a global backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic as it ebbs and flows from 2020 to the date of writing in 2022, leaving a tragic and catastrophic trail of deaths, long-term illness, isolation and eyewatering, unsustainable hikes to our cost of living for the future. Liveability is in jeopardy. The pandemic, Achille Mbembe notes, revealed an “unevenness in our capacity to breathe,” with the “motif of breathing being associated with violence and the atmosphere.”26 The pandemic radically exposed and magnified the entrenched global social inequalities, injustices and extreme unequal distribution of wealth and basic civil needs to care and sustain a society (healthcare, food, vital amenities, safety, education). This period focused our attention on who was being cared for and who remained invisible and felt discarded. COVID effectively made plain the impact and legacy of colonialism apparent in the recorded deaths (by numbers) and the precarity of Black lives globally. In writing about Venus as an amalgam of lives from the slavery archives about a “dead girl,” Hartman reminds us of the way “in which our age is tethered to hers.” The “afterlife of slavery,” Hartman observes, recognizes “a past that has yet to be done, and the ongoing state of emergency in which Black life remains in peril.”27 The structuring principles of colonial inequality continued to open the door to responsive involvement to social change and revolutionary struggles. The pandemic at times acted as a prism for us as citizens to see the ways in which governments and financial institutions had the potential to step in, to intervene and disrupt the “natural” financial market flow of goods and services that we were hitherto subjected 279

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to. I recall the intense creative online space of the pandemic in which artists and healers worked, and yet I am reminded of the invisible presence of the racialized woman cleaner who worked/works to clean and remove dirt and objects from the spaces that others like us enjoy. I am thinking about then and now, the street protests, anti-racism marches, strikes for better working conditions, social justice campaigns and social organizing as they continue to emerge as we succumbed to the convergent legacies of the pandemic and extreme right-wing political populism. As the pandemic ebbed away for the summer, a frisson of excitement underpinned cultural events planned as we stretched out of our bubbles and faced the prospect of jostling amongst others. The curation and central theme of the exhibition entitled The Milk of Dreams of the 59th Venice Biennale 2022 is influenced by the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, in order to evoke life “constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination.”28 Lines of desire to imagine a better planet would appeal as we emerged from the pandemic. I had the privilege to visit this exhibition. As I walked through the galleries, it was as if the dreamscapes, surreal moments and other worldly imaginative thoughts were the domain of European-centered thought and the creative work by artists associated with the Western canon. Envisioned futurescapes remained outside the purview of the Black woman artist and artist of color and could not be challenged to include our wildly imagined and nonEuropean spaces. This is despite the timely and cogent artworks by Zineb Sedira, Sonia Boyce and Simone Leigh featured in some of the pavilions nearby. And yet, we are already working with the future. A decolonial framing for creativity emergent from Caribbean locations, expression, speech, environments, living spaces, terrains and seas is constituted by the poetic, imaginative marks creating the artworks. Some contemporary work directly draws on the historical and memory knowledge of marronage as practices of escape from slavery, liberation and strategies of survival. These artworks become symbolic of the powerful created space and desire for freedom from the violence of colonial power. Marronage then offers the dream of flight and escape to a created safe space elsewhere, evoking parallel narratives to that of slavery, indentureship and the plantationocene.29 Artworks that re-frame geographies create objects and spaces from elsewhere, or draw on memories of flight, bring into question the naturalization of oppression. In Nadia Huggins’s photographic series Fighting the Currents from the Transformation series (2014), we can see emancipatory ideas of the body, self-apparent as partially framed and obscured images that frame the figure and make use of material textures of sea objects and ocean colours. These juxtapositioned underwater images might be construed as sustaining an intimate relationship to the sea, integral to our bodies and memories which links the Caribbean body to the fantastical and futuristic configurations of transhumanism. The self appears estranged in the landscape to transport us to a more futuristic and alien space. We perform as “hybrid-auto-instituting-languagingstorytelling species” as Sylvia Wynter proposes, that is with “transformative powers of poetic knowledges” with the capacity to “inscript ourselves into being” needing to “fundamentally take into account the ways ‘we’ narrate ourselves.”30 Like Kei Miller’s mermaid, speculative envisioning is the thing of utopias, hauntings and dreamscapes which we all have a right to, in order to construct a home/planet of our future. Putting our imagination to work through poetic knowledge at moments of crisis are particularly pressing. Central to my artwork Like Gold Dust (2019) (see ­Figure 20.1), for example, are the fictionalized presence of women environmental activists evoked through the sound installation and staged photographs inspired by the work 280

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Figure 20.1  Roshini Kempadoo, Like Gold Dust, 2019.  Giclée print, 101.6  cm ×57.15 cm, ­courtesy of the artist.

including Wangarĩ Maathai, Amalia Ortiz and Alissa Trotz as part of the Guyanese women’s group Red Thread. I am interested in a “what if” scenario that imagines a different potential and future, to propose a differently configured feminist future for Guyana as an emerging oil economy and for Latinx and Indigenous women activists living in the US. Possibilities open up through deep knowledge of trees and the specific terrain and landscape they live in with the potential to be as magical as the promise of gold dust.31 The installation includes an extract from the poem The Secret Powers of Naming (2006) by Sara Littlecrow-Russell. Ghost Dancing (referred to in the title of this entry) is recognized as an act and principle of liberation. Evoked as spiritual knowledge and memory, Ghost Dancing was a form of protest widely adopted by first nation communities from 1890 onwards as a ceremony in order to stave off potential genocide at the hands of white settlers and performed as resistance to assimilation. Littlecrow-Russell converges past and present to note the potential for revolution once more, evoked as “tree roots” lurking just beneath the surface of the sidewalk already bursting through the concrete.32 These and other artworks are rooted through the imaginative, fantastical and spectral spaces, envisioned and conjured from Caribbean terrains, seascapes, sensibility and materiality.33 They may evoke specters or human-animal hybrids that Andil Gosine describes as defining qualities of humanness as “not animal.”34 They offer creative responses of radical kinship, transnational and intergenerational relations beyond nations, regions, planetary and heteronormative familial bonds.35 Such creativity alludes to imagining social transformation, thinking and acting, built through the recognition and acknowledgement of practices of indigeneity, of African thinking and creativity, whilst maintaining anti-­essentialist, creolized perspectives. Caribbean artists, their practice and creativity contribute to expanding questions, sustaining critique and the work of decoloniality to offer visions of how to constitute autonomous, independent thinking and 281

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transform oppressive power. It is through envisioning and symbolically transforming our understanding of the afterlives of colonialism that the works contribute to, animating future liveable lives of survival, repair and restoration.

Notes 1 Kei Miller, “The Law Concerning Mermaids,” in 100 Queer Poems, ed. Andrew McMillan and Mary Jean Chan (London: Vintage, 2022). 2 Seminal writings and thinking on decolonial discourse, analysis and methodology are: Walter D. Mignolo, The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (On Decoloniality) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2021); Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2018); Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 3rd ed. (London, Dublin, New York: Zed Books, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021); María Lugones Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, eds., Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala: Caribbean, Meso, and South American Contributions and Challenges (Global Critical Caribbean Thought) (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021); Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007); and Françoise Vergès, A Decolonial Feminism (London: Pluto Press, 2021). 3 For details of two recent exhibitions on Caribbean visual art: “Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s – Now,” (website), Tate Publisher, 2021, accessed 3 March ­ 2022, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/life-between-islands. “Fragments of Epic Memory,” Art Gallery of Ontario, 2021, accessed 3 March 2022, https://ago.ca/exhibitions/ fragments-epic-memory. 4 “The 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams,” La Biennale Di Venezia, 2022, accessed 3 March 2022, https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2022/ 59th-exhibition. 5 Ruangrupa provide more details of the term lumbung for Documenta 15 online. Documenta und Museum Fridericianum. “Documenta 15” accessed 15 May 2022, https://documenta-fifteen.de/ en/glossary/?entry=lumbung 6 See recent writings that provide overview and bibliographies: Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Deborah A. Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021); Mimi Sheller, Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Malcom Ferdinand, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022); Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2011); Esther Figueroa, “Fly Me To The Moon,” (Jamaica, 2019) (video). 7 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 8. 8 Anna Tsing, Gregg Mitman and Donna Haraway, Reflections on the Plantationocene: A conversation with Donna Haraway & Anna Tsing moderated by Gregg Mitman (University of ­Wisconsin-Madison: Edge Effects Magazine with support from the Center for Culture, History, and Environment in the Nelson Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2019), https:// edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/. 9 Recent artworks including those by Camille Chedda, Shannon Alonzo, Ebony G. Patterson, Christopher Cozier, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Cosmo Whyte, Carol Sorhaindo, Nadia Huggins, Tony Capellán (1955–2017) explore the ongoing impact of colonial violence emergent from plantation practices and the specific of Caribbean island terrains, lands and seascapes. 10 Shannon Alonzo has been Alice Yard’s fifth artist in residence at Documenta 15 during July 2022, Kassel. Shannon extended the artwork Subterranean Sentiments of Belonging created during her

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Imagining Mermaids and Recalling Ghost Dancing residency at Alice Yard, Granderson Lab in 2020. This included the video installation documenting the creation and erasure of three charcoal and graphite wall drawings created. 11 Tatiana Flores and Michelle Ann Stephens, eds., Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (Long Beach, CA: Museum of Latin American Art, 2017, distributed by Duke University Press), 15. 12 Malcom Ferdinand, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, trans. Anthony Paul Smith (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2022), 26. 13 Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 265. 14 United Nations interview, Unlocking the Chains of a Long Journey - Christopher Cozier (United Nations, 2019), video. Christopher Cozier as a founding member of the Alice Yard arts collective is involved in contributing to Documenta 15. See: https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/ lumbung-members-artists/alice-yard/ 15 Pluto Press, Françoise Vergès, Lola Olufemi – A Decolonial Feminism | Pluto Live, directed by Pluto Press (London, 2021), video. 16 Krista Thompson conceptualises tropicalization as “complex Visual Systems Through Which The Islands Were Imaged for Tourist Consumption and the Social and Political Implications of these Representations on Actual Physical Space on the Islands and Their Inhabitants,” in An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, ed. Krista A. Thompson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 5. 17 Creole theories, or the study of creole sensibilities, symbolic representations, culture, practices, languages, and populations, have been conceptualised over several decades, spanning several generations and, as Verene Shepherd and Glen L. Richards suggest, theories of creolization have dominated the intellectual fields of Caribbean and Atlantic world history. For further reading: Verene Shepherd and Glen L. Richards, eds., Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture (Kingston, Oxford: Ian Randle Publishers and James Currey Publishers, 2002); Edward Brathwaite, Islands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Edward Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (­Kingston: Savacou Publications, 1974); Édouard Glissant, La Lézarde (New York: George ­Braziller, 1958); Édouard Glissant, “The Quarrel with History” (lecture, Carifest Colloquium, Kingston, Jamaica, 1976). 18 Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989). 19 Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds. The Creolization of Theory (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 17. 20 A selection of dynamic artworks that reconfigure the self through autobiographical expression includes: Sheena Rose’s Sweet Gossip (2013), Ewan Atkinson’s Bubalups/Mother Sally: Private Audition (2013), Irénée Shaw’s Dividing Line (1995) O’Neil Lawrence’s series Sons of a Champion (2012) or the late Belkis Ramírez’s work De maR en peor (2001). Other artists work such as Deborah Jack’s series what is the value of water if it doesn’t quench our thirst for… (2015) or Nadia Huggins underwater/oceanic photograph Transformations No.1 (2014) are emergent from the specificity of geo-archipelagic formations of landscapes, sea and rivers. 21 Donna Haraway, “The Persistence of Vision,” in The Visual Culture Reader: Second Edition, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2002), 677–684. 22 Trinh T. Minh-ha, Women, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 22. 23 Françoise Vergès, A Decolonial Feminism (London: Pluto Press, 2021), 2. 24 See Beverley Mullings, “Criminalization on a World Scale: Racial Capitalism, Finance, and the Crime of Poverty in the Caribbean,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 26, no. 1 (2022): 169–180. 25 Annie Paul names and explores the term “alter natives” in her interview with Christopher Cozier in 2003. Annie Paul, “Christopher Cozier,” BOMB 82 (2003). Accessed 26 September 2010. https:// bombmagazine.org/articles/christopher-cozier/.

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Roshini Kempadoo 26 Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), University of the Witwatersrand, “Achille Mbembe, Fanon on the Matter of Breathing,” WiSER Public Position Series 2021: Fanon After Fanon, accessed 7 April 2021, https://wiser.wits.ac.za/event/public-positions-fanon-after-fanon-i-session-3achille-mbembe-7-april-6pm-sa-time. 27 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 13. 28 Roberto Cicutto and Cecilia Alemani, Venice Biennale 2022 – The Milk of Dreams Is the Title of the 59th International Art Exhibition (Venice: Biennial Foundation, 2021). 29 Artworks that it could be said artistically explore the culture of maroonage include: Charles Campbell’s sculptural installation Maroonscape 1: Cockpit Archipelago (2019); Firelei Báez’s installation of the archeological ruins of the Sans-Souci Palace in Haiti created for ICA Watershed, Boston (2021); Keisha Scarville’s Mama’s Clothes series (2016) and Scherezade Garcia’s work with life-buoy rings, In My Floating World, Landscape of Paradise, from the series Theories on Freedom (2010). 30 Sylvia Wynter, “Africa, the West, and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text after Man,” Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory, and the Moving Image (London: BFI, 2000), 25. 31 The first iteration of the artwork Like Gold Dust was researched, created by Roshini Kempadoo (this author) and exhibited in Spring 2019 whilst on the International Artist-in-Residence (IAIR) at Artpace, San Antonio, Texas, USA, 2019. The artwork consists of a photographic series, audio/ sound installation, video projection and poem extract by Sara Littlecrow-Russell. This was at the invitation of guest curator Deborah Willis, writer, photographer and Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. 32 Sara Littlecrow-Russell, “Ghost Dance,” in The Secret Powers of Naming (Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2006). 33 Other works noted are: Ewan Atkinson’s Starman Visits: Statue (2009), and The Neighbourhood Project (2006 - ) and Kelly Sinnapah Mary’s work Notebook of No Return (2017). 34 Andil Gosine, Nature’s Wild: Love Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2021), 116. 35 The term “radical kinship” was recently explored by Layal Ftouni as part of her residency as a “global visiting scholar” at CSGS in 2020. An online event with guests Lisa Duggan, Che Gossett, Shellyne Rodriguez, and Helga Tawil Souri, organized and moderated by Layal Ftouni and introduced by Gayatri Gopinath, took place entitled Radical Kinship: Solidarity and Political Belonging (New York: CSGS NYU, 2021).

Selected Bibliography Cozier, Christopher and Roshini Kempadoo. “Each Time We Meet: Christopher Cozier and Roshini Kempadoo in conversation.” In Experiences of Oil, edited by Anne Szefer Karlsen, and Helga ­Nyman, 113–127. Trondheim, Norway: Museumsforlaget. Farquharson, Alex, and David A. Bailey. eds. Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s – Now. London: Tate Publishing, 2021. Ferdinand, Malcom. Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022. Flores, Tatiana, and Michelle Ann Stephens, eds. Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago. Long Beach, CA: Museum of Latin American Art, distributed by Duke University Press, 2017. Gosine, Andil. Nature’s Wild: Love Sex, and Law in the Caribbean. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2021. Kempadoo, Roshini. Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence and Location of the Caribbean Figure. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih, eds. The Creolization of Theory. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011.

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Imagining Mermaids and Recalling Ghost Dancing McKittrick, Katherine, and Sylvia Wynter. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations.” In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick, 9–89. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. McMillan, Andrew, and Mary Jean Chan, eds. 100 Queer Poems. London: Vintage, 2022. Mullings, Beverley. “Criminalization on a World Scale: Racial Capitalism, Finance, and the Crime of Poverty in the Caribbean.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 26 (1) (2022): 169–180. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 3rd edition. London, Dublin, New York: Zed Books, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. Vergès, Françoise. A Decolonial Feminism. London: Pluto Press, 2021.

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21 DECOLONIZING CALIFORNIA MISSION ART AND ARCHITECTURE STUDIES Yve Chavez

Through a Critical Mission Studies approach rooted in decolonizing methodologies and Indigenous epistemologies that confronts settler colonial histories and romanticized perspectives, this chapter argues that California mission art and architecture studies sustains colonial hegemony at the expense of Indigenous histories. In a subversive turn away from historical studies of “mission art” or “Spanish colonial art” that mention Indigenous contributions as part of a new style that emerged in the mission era (1769–1834), I argue that Indigenous practices and agency, both visible and invisible, were at the center of the art and architecture they made at the missions. The missions disrupted an established Indigenous system of art-making and architectural practice. Despite colonial introductions that threatened to replace Indigenous ideas, California Indian artists and cultural practitioners resisted. Jarrett Martineau (nêhiyaw [Plains Cree] and Dene Sųłiné) and Eric Ritskes explain that “Indigenous art unbinds indigeneity from its colonial limits by weaving past and future Indigenous worlds into new currents of present struggle.”1 Like Martineau and Ritskes, I maintain the term “Indigenous art” as a device for unshackling California Indian art and architecture from colonial narratives and underscoring their survival beyond the missions. Jonathan Cordero (Chumash/Ohlone) has observed that the study and curation of art from the missions sustains colonial hegemony through its privileging of non-Native epistemologies.2 Building on Cordero’s observation and my personal background as the descendant of Tongva-speaking survivors who lived at the fourth Alta California mission of San Gabriel, I argue that we need to look beyond the visual record and dig into the unseen archive of knowledge that Indigenous peoples exercised at the California missions.3 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue that “Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life.”4 I take Tuck and Yang’s emphasis on land as the centerpiece of my decolonizing method to demonstrate that investigations of art and architecture at the missions must come to terms with the colonists’ role in displacing Indigenous peoples and scarring the land. A fire that burned the roof of Mission San Gabriel’s old church in the summer of 2020 ignited a range of responses from Native community members and allies, including speculation that the fire was tied to the concurrent toppling of Junipero Serra statues.5 Serra was the controversial Franciscan leader who oversaw the establishment of the first nine missions in California. Investigations later revealed the timing of the fire DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-25 286

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and statue toppling was coincidental.6 San Gabriel’s buildings stand as reminders of the ­devastation colonization wrought on our ancestors and the land. Some may view mission buildings like the San Gabriel Church as monuments to colonial powers that ought to be destroyed, but they are also the product of Native labor. To dignify that labor and reclaim mission sites for the living Indigenous community, I focus on the Native experience and knowledge in my reading of a stone church and domestic architecture that Acjachemen peoples built at the sixth Alta California mission of San Juan Capistrano within the village of Sajivit.7 Art historical myopia has obscured the accommodations California Indian artists made during the mission era (1769–1834) by incorporating foreign styles within the art and architecture they produced while also maintaining Native practices. As Clara Bargellini notes about misguided perceptions of the California missions, The most obvious is the unspoken assumption that most of the objects at the mission are somehow “native” art … The basis for attributing these and other works to Natives is often merely that they are somewhat crude, and that the subject matter is not religious; besides, they are “anonymous”.8 This assumption, rooted in racist thinking, not only dismisses the ingenuity of Native artists who executed foreign styles in the building and decoration of mission churches to meet colonists’ interests but also the movement of goods and people from other parts of Spain’s empire that furnished the missions. More research remains to be done on the provenance of objects at the missions to correctly link them to their makers or places of origin, which would further dispel the myth Bargellini identifies. More importantly, the mission churches, museums, and their collections ought to be studied within the context of their locations: on Indigenous land. The land is often overlooked for its invisible qualities, specifically the relationship of Indigenous stewards with native plants, animals, and other resources that are central to Indigenous life. This chapter centers invisibility, in reference to the unseen agency of colonized peoples, as a mode for decentering colonial ruptures to California Indian practices. It focuses on the actions of Indigenous artists who simultaneously accommodated foreign ideas while maintaining Indigenous techniques. The chapter begins with a brief history of colonization that situates California with Spain’s colonial matrix of power (CMP), to use Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh’s concept, which refers to the role early modern colonization played in setting in motion the events we now associate with the modern era.9 Missionization, beginning in 1769, initiated a ripple effect of devastating events and policies that continue to disenfranchise California Indians. Then, it establishes a methodological and theoretical framework that is rooted in decolonial and settler colonial studies. A case study of Mission San Juan Capistrano’s stone church and the no longer extant Indigenous willow-framed dome house structures, called kiichas in the Acjachemen language, demonstrates that unearthing the unseen is crucial to understanding mission spaces. This chapter considers invisible place-making activities accessible through historical descriptions and ecological evidence, such as the use of local materials, to underscore the complexities of architecture and art Native peoples made at the missions. Part of the process of decolonizing the study of art and architecture made at and for the missions is to no longer use labels such as “mission art” or “Spanish Colonial,” that sustain colonial agendas.10 Instead, it is time to look individually at the practices represented within 287

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their cultural context. Before explaining what a decolonial praxis looks like, it is crucial to consider the circumstances through which art and architectural styles and ideas came to be associated with California’s mission histories. Before Spanish colonists gave it the name California, which is derived from a fictional island in a medieval era novel, the region was home to Indigenous peoples for millennia.11 By 1769, Spanish colonists established the first mission of San Diego in the Kumeyaay homelands. The 1769 invasion signaled the starting point in which Spanish Imperialism pushed California and its inhabitants into a global matrix of colonial powers that resulted in the movement of objects and peoples into and out of California. Franciscan friars from the Iberian Peninsula brought artistic styles that influenced the outward appearance of California’s mission churches and they imported ecclesiastical art from Spain, Baja California, central Mexico, and Asia to furnish the churches. Whereas some permanent buildings like churches survived, ephemeral willow-framed dome houses occupied by Native families are no longer visible, except for smaller-scale modern reconstructions at select missions including San Juan Capistrano, San Diego, San G ­ abriel, and San Francisco de Asís.12 The absence of outwardly Indigenous-made structures in the form of mission-era (1769–1834) willow-framed dome houses has contributed to the perceived reading of permanent structures as European.13 In other words, by drawing a distinction between churches and Indigenous structures that pre-existed the missions, architecture studies position the former as colonial, and therefore, non-Native constructions. I subvert this reading of the built environment by arguing that California Indians accommodated outside ideas and styles when they constructed permanent buildings like the churches. Whereas colonial Latin American art studies have shifted away from discussions of Indigenous survivals and towards centering Native agency in analyses of colonial-era architecture, California studies are slow to make this change.14 Spain controlled California from 1769 until 1821 when newly independent Mexico gained control of the region. Mexico oversaw California for 27 years before it entered the union in 1848 and gained US statehood in 1850. Within a century of American occupation, studies emerged on the art and architecture associated with California’s missions. Indigenous contributions often appear as an afterthought within publications focused on celebrating Spanish colonial achievements.15 In some instances, authors linked works deemed derivative of European art to Native artisans.16 More recently, art historical scholarship has shifted away from the outmoded approach Bargellini identified to expose rather than perpetuate assumptions that just because something looks crude or is anonymous that an Indigenous artist made it. Taking a different approach, Cynthia Neri Lewis’s investigations of wall paintings at Mission Santa Barbara suggest that certain mission design elements associated with European antecedents were not necessarily the product of European artists.17 Neri Lewis’s acknowledgment that Indigenous artists also worked in imported styles disrupts the association of crudity with Indigeneity. Given the dearth of mission-era records noting Indigenous artists’ names, I turn to art and architecture that is rooted in established Indigenous practices rather than focusing on works that appear as derivatives of European art.18 For the field to move forward and disrupt colonial hegemony, emerging scholars need interdisciplinary training in Native American and colonial Latin American art (including early modern European art), California Indian history and anthropology, and Indigenous studies. Those looking to investigate imported art from the Philippines and China would also benefit from training in Asian art and early modern imperial history. Drawing upon my Tongva background and art historical training in colonial Latin American art and the Indigenous arts of the Americas, I extract California Indian art and architecture 288

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from Eurocentric understandings and instead treat it as the embodiment of Indigenous ­knowledge that crosses generations and is rooted in relationships (to home and resources) rather than hierarchies (European versus non-European). Indigenous art, as Martineau and Ritskes argue, “evokes a fugitive aesthetic that, in its decolonial ruptural forms, refuses the struggle for better or more inclusion and recognition and, instead, chooses refusal and flight as modes of freedom.”19 Likewise, California Indian basketry, sculpture, regalia, painting, rock art, and architecture from the mission era and beyond signal a refusal of settler control and academic tokenism. One of the first steps towards decolonizing the study of the missions is acknowledging the first peoples of the land and their refusal to see their culture replaced. To accomplish this goal, we must move beyond analyses of the visible (as seen in mission buildings and art collections) to critical investigation of the invisible (colonial devastation of the environment and its stewards). Scholars have a responsibility to acknowledge the first ­peoples upon whose homelands each mission is located. The missions directly impacted the Pomo, Wappo, Lake Miwok, Coast Miwok, Patwin, Ohlone, Esselen, Salinan, Chumash, ­Tataviam, Tongva, Acjachemen, Payomkowishum (Luiseño), Kumeyaay, Ipai and Tipai. The Franciscan friars also relocated inland groups such as the Yokuts, Cahuilla, Cupeño, Mohave, Cocopa, Quechan, and Serrano to the missions.20 Due in part to Spain’s failure to place land in title for Native peoples, many of these communities remain federally unrecognized and displaced from our homelands where we cannot afford to live.21 Today, the lands the missions occupy are either the property of the Catholic Church or the state, and, with limited exceptions, lack formal land acknowledgments.22 In consultation with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, Santa Cruz Mission State Historic Park has developed a land acknowledgment that is available on its website. California State Parks representatives are also in the process of developing land acknowledgments with local tribal partners across the state.23 Meanwhile, art historical publications on the missions also are slow to acknowledge Indigenous land and instead discuss the buildings and their art in isolation from the surrounding environment. A disregard for Indigenous land sustains the settler colonial violence that ruptured California Indian connections to their ancestral homelands. As Kyle Whyte (Potawatomi) explains, “settler colonialism commits environmental injustice through strategically undermining Indigenous collective continuance.”24 This continuance remains unaddressed at many of the missions. To push mission museums and scholarship on the missions in new directions, this chapter draws upon a decolonizing method that directly addresses the hard truths of colonization, to borrow a concept Ho-Chunk historian Amy Lonetree uses in reference to the difficult histories of genocide and settler violence that museums often dismiss.25 By minimizing the lived Indigenous presence and connection to missionized lands, mission staff and scholars present an apologist narrative that falsely justifies settler hegemony and ecological destruction. California’s first peoples were and remain stewards of the lands that the missions occupy, yet Spanish colonists disregarded the cultivation methods that were vital to maintaining ecological stability. Ecological stewardship was central to basket weaving, architecture, regalia-making and other practices that continued beyond the mission era (1769–1834). Settler colonialism threatened these practices and has rendered them nearly invisible through its prioritization of the permanent and monumental. I extend Patrick Wolfe’s argument that “settler colonialism destroys to replace” as an explanation not just for the destruction of Native peoples but also their cultures.26 Spanish and subsequent settlers’ elimination of native 289

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plants and animals through Western farming practices and monumental architecture both ­committed environmental injustice, to use Whyte’s words, and effectively replaced landbased knowledge tied to ephemeral architecture, weaving, and regalia-making. Stone and adobe churches and buildings seen at the missions departed from established ephemeral architectural practices, but they remain the product of Indigenous labor. Yet, previous scholarship has treated permanent structures as hybrids or derivatives of European models. Terms like “hybrid,” “mission,” or “Spanish colonial” imply that California Indians were inferior and somehow their practices improved through colonization.27 This notion of Western superiority is tied to the Spanish mentality that California Indians underutilized the land and it was, therefore, available and in need of control through farming and livestock grazing.28 Indigenous practices, on the other hand, were customized to meet the needs of the land and its inhabitants rather than compete with it. In similar fashion, through basket weaving, architecture, regalia-making, sculpture, and rock art, Native artists and makers cultivated resources and only took what they needed. Practices such as controlled burns used to remove dead vegetation and encourage new growth, distributing gathering sites among weavers, and collecting materials seasonally remain obscured by the current scholarship’s emphasis on the tangible. Prioritizing iconological studies of monumental architecture and art at the expense of established Indigenous practices does a disservice to the Native makers and their knowledge that existed prior to colonization. Grounding studies of art and architecture made at and for the missions within Indigenous epistemologies is necessary to bring Native contributions to visibility as demonstrated through the following case study of Mission San Juan Capistrano’s stone church. Father Fermín Francisco de Lasuén founded Mission San Juan Capistrano in 1775.29 After the community abandoned the original mission, Junípero Serra re-founded it in 1776. The local Acjachemen labor force constructed the adobe mission buildings including the Serra chapel that became the main space where services took place after the earthquake of 1812. Previously, services occurred in the stone church built between 1797 and 1806. The 180-feet long and 40-feet wide building collapsed during the earthquake, killing 40 Native people (Figure 21.1).30 The non-Native clergy officiating mass at the time of the earthquake survived since they occupied a different portion of the building away from the collapsed vaulted roof and they had access to doorways.31 Regarding the disparity in earthquake victims, Karin Vélez argues, “When this statistic is left undiscussed, and unaccompanied by mention of the hundreds of surviving Catholic Indians at the mission, it risks relegating the Acjachemen Indians to the status of stone ruins, destroyed and frozen in time.”32 Vélez raises a crucial point that highlights the shortcomings of the Catholic Church for failing to treat Native peoples as equals to the colonists. She points out that despite the church’s practice of burying human remains inside church buildings, the Acjachemen “victims’ were extracted from the wreckage and reinterred.”33 Rather than dignifying the Native peoples who were church goers, church leaders removed from the victims’ remains from ruins of the stone church and in recent years curators have placed signage noting that 40 people had died without specifying that the majority were women.34 Expanding on Vélez’s point regarding the relegation of Acjachemen victims to the status of stone ruins, I call for a re-reading of the stone church that acknowledges the significance of the building’s materiality to Native people while also considering the possibility that the families of the victims did not want their loved ones interred within the space that wrought their demise. Despite their physical absence from the church ruins, the memories of the Acjachemen people who built the stone church are embedded in the walls that 290

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Figure 21.1  Stone Church, built 1797–1806, Mission San Juan Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano, CA. Photograph by author.

remain standing. Visitors can see the shells and coral fragments that Acjachemen builders mixed into the mortar which held the stone blocks together (Figure 21.2). Even when they were first constructing mission buildings, Native laborers were indigenizing the built environment by including culturally significant local materials. The shells and coral serve as reminders of California’s first peoples who struggled to maintain their traditions at the missions and refused to abandon their practices. Prior to the introduction of the Spanish peso, California Indians used shell coins as currency when exchanging goods within and outside of their own communities. The Acjachemen and other coastal communities also used shells as personal adornments.35 California Indians even used shells ground into lime for whitewashing the exteriors of mission buildings.36 Unlike established Indigenous architecture, like the kiicha, that was based on a practice of cultivating native plants and only taking what was needed, the stone church signaled compromises Indigenous builders made to accommodate the Franciscans’ interest in permanent buildings. Quarrying stone not only placed a strain on the people doing the labor but also the land from which it was extracted. Where did California Indian builders quarry the stone? Did the builders come from villages near stone quarries? Why did they use shell in the church walls? Where did they acquire the shell? Did they take the shells directly from the beach or from shell mounds? Though beyond the scope of this chapter, future studies ought to address these questions while also considering the long-term impacts of mission building activities on the land and its Indigenous inhabitants. 291

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Figure 21.2  Shell in mortar in east wall of Stone Church, Mission San Juan Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano, CA. Photograph by author.

In contrast to the stone church, the Acjachemen families’ kiichas are no longer visible at Mission San Juan Capistrano. Throughout central and southwestern California, N ­ ative peoples built willow-framed dome houses that early explorers described in their journals as early as the sixteenth century.37 At the missions, families continued to make these houses that they occupied within the rancherias located adjacent to center of the mission grounds. Adobe houses eventually replaced mission era willow-framed dome houses in the nineteenth century.38 The absence of mission-era houses today raises the question, do visitors need to see willow-framed dome houses at the missions to recognize Indigenous architectural involvement at these sites? We should not have to see something that is obviously Indigenous-made to acknowledge Native contributions to the mission’s built environment. Replicas like those the living Acjachemen community build periodically at Mission San Juan Capistrano show visitors that there is diversity in the type of architecture Native people make. Unfortunately, by designating the replica kiichas, as stand-ins for mission-era Indian housing, the mission curators sustain the misconception that these are the only examples of Indigenous architecture. Curators at Mission San Juan Capistrano and the other missions ought to describe churches and adobe buildings as Native structures to not only pay respects to the ancestors who sacrificed their lives to make the missions function but also to dignify those who pivoted to meet colonial interests. Despite stylistically reflecting European antecedents with its original vaulted ceiling, buttresses, pilasters, and arches, Mission San Juan Capistrano’s stone church represents 292

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the architectural and religious accommodations Native peoples made by constructing a building type that was new to them out of different materials not typically used in Indigenous architecture. Though unprecedented, mission churches like San Juan Capistrano’s were unique reflections of the ingenuity California Indian people brought to these spaces. Each of the California mission churches was unique in its appearance, materiality, and construction. The trend of describing these churches and the art made for them as part of a “mission” style unfairly suggests the missionaries were responsible for their creation. The Franciscans brought their awareness of popular styles from Europe and Mexico, but what emerged in California would not have been possible without Indigenous involvement. Knowledge of where to gather native plants, collect shells, and quarry stone may go overlooked, but it was necessary for the construction of both churches and Native houses. Beyond acknowledging the invisible qualities that link architecture from the missions to Indigenous practices, the missions have a responsibility to not only make the voices of the living Native community heard but also relinquish them from colonial control. Our ancestors refused to abandon their culture. As their descendants, we refuse to accept outdated narratives and instead reclaim the land upon which the missions stand for our communities.

Notes 1 Jarrett Martineau and Eric Ritskes, “Fugitive Indigeneity: Reclaiming the Terrain of Decolonial Struggle Through Indigenous Art,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 1 (2014): x. 2 Jonathan Cordero, “Concluding Thoughts: On Decolonizing the Study of Mission Art,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 2, no. 3 (2020): 111. 3 I write this chapter while living as a guest on the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe. The members of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band are the traditional stewards of the land. For more information on the land UCSC occupies, see “Land Acknowledgement,” UCSC, accessed June 30, 2021, https://www.ucsc.edu/land-acknowledgement/. Hereafter, I refer to Alta California as California. 4 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1. 5 For different perspectives, see Alex Wigglesworth, “Massive Fire at Historic San ­Gabriel ­Mission Destroys Roof and Much of the Interior,” Los Angeles Times, July 11, 2020, https://www.latimes. com/california/story/2020–07–11/san-gabriel-mission-fire; Alejandra ­Molina, “Fire That Destroyed Roof of The San G ­ abriel Mission Church Remains Under I­nvestigation,” Religious News Service, July 13, 2020, https://religionnews.com/2020/07/13/fire-that-destroyed-roof-ofthe-san-gabriel-mission-remains-under-investigation/ 6 For information about the arsonist, see Andrew J. Campa, Richard Winton, and James Queally, “Man Accused of Setting Fire to San Gabriel Mission Had Conflicts with Staff, Sources Say,” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021–05-04/man-chargedwith-arson-in-san-gabriel-mission-fire. 7 Regarding the village name, Engelhardt writes that Serra “called the site on which the Mission stood Quanís-savit. Either he was misinformed or he misunderstood the name; for another hand later canceled this name and substituted Sajivit.” Zephyrin Engelhardt, San Juan Capistrano ­Mission (Los Angeles: Standard Printing, 1922), 192. 8 Clara Bargellini, “The California Missions in Art History,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 2, no. 3 (2020): 62. 9 The authors explain, “Coloniality is constitutive, not derivative, of modernity. That is to say, there is no modernity without coloniality, thus the compound expression: modernity/coloniality. Our intent is to help the reader understand how the colonial matrix of power (CMP, of which modernity/ coloniality is a shorter expression) was constituted, manages, and transformed from its historical foundation in the sixteenth century to the present.” Walter D. Mignolo, and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 4.

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Yve Chavez 10 Kurt Baer was one of the first art historians to write about art found in California mission collections, describing it as “Spanish Colonial.” Kurt Baer, “Spanish Colonial Art in the California Missions,” The Americas 18, no. 1 (July 1961): 33–54. Lanier Bartlett published an earlier study based on investigations the Works Progress Administration conducted in the 1930s. See Lanier Bartlett, ed. Mission Motifs: A Collection of Decorative Details from Old Spanish Missions of California (Los Angeles: Works Progress Administration, 1940). 11 The name California came from Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s sixteenth-century novel, Las Sergas de Esplandián (The Labors of the Very Brave Knight Esplandián). For more information, see Rose Marie Beebe, and Robert M. Senkewicz, “1510: The Invention of ‘California’, Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo,” in Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535–1846, edited by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz (Santa Clara: Santa Clara University, 2001), 9. 12 A kiicha has not been a consistent feature of Mission San Juan Capistrano’s grounds. 13 In his comparative study of architecture in California and New Mexico, George Kubler stated, “Californian ornament is essentially European; that of New Mexico conserves an Indian at all times.” George Kubler, “Two Modes of Franciscan Architecture: New Mexico and California,” in Franciscan Presence in the Americas: Essays on the Activities of the Franciscan Friars in the Americas, 1492–1900, ed. Francisco Morales (Potomac: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1983), 371. In a separate study, Kurt Baer argued that the Indians had no architecture. Kurt Baer, Architecture of the California Missions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958). 14 For studies that center Indigenous agency, see James B. Kiracofe, “Architectural Fusion and ­Indigenous Ideology in Early Colonial Teposcolula. The Casa de la Cacica: A Building at the Edge of Oblivion,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 66 (1995): 45–84; Alessia Frassani, “At the Crossroads of Empire: Urban Form and Ritual Action in Colonial Yanhuitlan, Oaxaca, Mexico,” Getty Research Journal 4 (2012): 31–44. 15 Edith Buckland Webb, “Pigments Used by the Mission Indians of California,” The Americas 2, no. 2 (October 1945): 137–150; Kurt Baer, Painting and Sculpture at Mission Santa Barbara (Washington, DC: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1955); Kurt Baer, Treasures of Mission Santa Inés (Fresno: Academy of American Church History, 1956); Baer, “Spanish Colonial Art in the California Missions;” Kubler, “Two Modes of Franciscan Architecture.” 16 Francis J. Weber, “The Stations at San Fernando,” The Masterkey 39 (January–March 1965): 7–11; George Harwood Phillips, “Indian Paintings from the Mission San Fernando: An Historical Interpretation,” The Journal of California Anthropology 3 (Summer 1976): 96–114; Norman Neuerburg, “The Indian Via Crucis from Mission San Fernando: An Historical Exposition,” Southern California Quarterly 79 (Fall 1997): 329–382; George Harwood Phillips, “The Stations of the Cross Revisited, Reconsidered, and Revised (sort of),” Boletín: The Journal of the California Mission Studies Association 24:2 (2007): 76–87; Norman Neuerburg, The Decoration of the California Missions (Santa Barbara: Bellerophon Books, 1987); Norman Neuerburg, “The Function of Prints in the California Missions,” Southern California Quarterly 67 (1985): 263–280; “Indian Carved Statues at Mission Santa Barbara,” Masterkey 51, no. 4 (October–­ December 1977): 147–151; Norman Neuerburg, “More Indian Sculpture at Mission Santa Barbara,” Masterkey 54, no. 4 (October–December 1980): 150–153; Norman Neuerburg, Painting in the California Missions (Los Angeles: Kellaway, 1977); Saints of the California Missions: Mission Paintings of the Spanish and Mexican Eras (Santa Barbara: Bellerophon Books, 2001); Georgia Lee and Norman Neuerburg, “The Alta California Indians as Artists before and after Contact,” in Columbian Consequences: V. 1 Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West, ed. David Hurst Thomas (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1989), 467–480. 17 Cynthia Neri Lewis, “Reframing Early Nineteenth-Century ‘Spanish-Franciscan’ Art of the Alta California Missions,” Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Annual Virtual Conference, March 12, 2021. 18 Chavez, “‘Remarkable Native Paintings’,” 106, 108. 19 Martineau and Ritskes, “Fugitive indigeneity,” IV. 20 I have attempted to list the names used today and apologize for any omissions. 21 With limited exceptions, most of the missions occupy neighborhoods with some of the highest real estate values in the state such as Sonoma, San Rafael, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Clara, Santa

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Decolonizing California Mission Art and Architecture Studies Cruz, Santa Barbara, San Buenaventura, San Gabriel, San Fernando, San Juan Capistrano, and San Diego. 22 Within the grounds of Mission San Gabriel there is a sign accompanying a reconstructed kiiy (willow-framed dome house) from 2008 that acknowledges the Tongva but is not currently a formal land acknowledgment. 23 The Santa Cruz Mission State Historic Park statement can be accessed at https://www.parks. ca.gov/548. Email communication with Martin Rizzo-Martinez, August 2021. 24 Kyle Whyte, “Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice,” Environment and ­Society: Advances in Research 9 (2018): 126. 25 Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal ­Museums (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 26 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide ­Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 388. 27 For more on terms related to hybrid and their implications for colonial art, see Charlene Villaseñor Black, “Race and the Historiography of Colonial Art,” in Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America, ed. Pamela A. Patton (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 303–323. 28 On farming as a method of control, see Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 56. Also, see Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism,” 395. For a discussion of colonist tactics in California, see M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 63–64. 29 Kimbro and Costello, The California Missions, 194. 30 Edward Singleton Holden, List of Recorded Earthquakes in California, Lower California, O ­ regon, and Washington Territory (Sacramento, CA: State Office, 1887), 20. Kimbro and C ­ ostello, The California Missions, 194. 31 Karin Vélez, “Stones and Bones: Catholic Responses to the 1812 Collapse of the Mission Church of Capistrano,” Material Religion 13, no. 4 (2017): 449. 32 Vélez, “Stones and Bones,” 449. 33 Vélez, “Stones and Bones,” 448. 34 Vélez provides a close analysis of the gender disparity among the victims in “Stones and Bones,” 447–450. 35 Travis Hudson and Thomas C. Blackburn, The Material Culture of Chumash Interaction Sphere. Volume III: Clothing, Ornamentation, and Grooming (Menlo Park: Ballena Press, 1985), 270; Lynn H. Gamble, “Shell Beads as Adornment and Money,” in First Coastal Californians, ed. Lynn H. Gamble (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2015), 7 36 Kurt Baer, Architecture of the California Missions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 17. 37 Herbert Eugene Bolton, ed. Relation of the Voyage of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, 1542–1543 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 25. 38 Engelhardt states that “In time, these primitive habitations were replaced by one-story adobe buildings.” Engelhardt, San Juan Capistrano Mission, 16. My survey of late nineteenth-century photographs depicting Mission San Juan Capistrano indicates that kiichas had disappeared from the built environment. Future investigations may uncover more precise dates regarding the decline of kiichas from the surrounding area.

Selected Bibliography Bargellini, Clara. “The California Missions in Art History.” Latin American and Latinx Visual ­Culture 2, no. 3 (2020): 60–66. Cordero, Jonathan. “Concluding Thoughts: On Decolonizing the Study of Mission Art.” Latin ­American and Latinx Visual Culture 2, no. 3 (2020): 109–111. Martineau, Jarrett, and Eric Ritskes. “Fugitive Indigeneity: Reclaiming the Terrain of Decolonial Struggle Through Indigenous Art.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 1 (2014): I–XII. Mignolo, Walter D., and Catherine E. Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. ­Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

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Yve Chavez Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. Vélez, Karin. “Stones and Bones: Catholic Responses to the 1812 Collapse of the Mission Church of Capistrano.” Material Religion 13, no. 4 (2017): 437–460. Villaseñor Black, Charlene. “Race and the Historiography of Colonial Art.” In Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America, edited by Pamela A. Patton, 303–323. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Whyte, Kyle. “Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice.” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 9 (2018): 125–144. Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide R ­ esearch 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.

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22 RADICAL PEDAGOGY Environmental Performances and the Politics of Hope Jane Chin Davidson

The innovative context for this volume’s decolonizing art history, described by the editors as encompassing “radical pedagogies that work to dismantle Western epistemologies” and strategies involving “methodologies that foreground collaboration and reciprocity” creates an opportunity to corroborate analyses for my larger research project. I have been compiling a critical genealogy of performance art environmentalism, defined by the environmental restorations and diverse advocacies of eco-art, eco-feminist art, earth art, and performing landscapes (works sited in the landscape) that have been presented globally since the 1960s–1970s. While the ideologies of eco-artists often diverge, especially eco-feminist ideals in opposition to the phallic gestures of land art, their different ecological and sited events coalesce around environmental activism and advocacy.1 Taking into account the larger cultural consequences, I had come to the conclusion that the contextualization of these works requires a decolonizing approach to the teaching of art history. While the generational aspect of environmental crisis brings this study into the urgent present of global warming marked by the prevalence of natural disasters – wildfires hurricanes, floods – a radical pedagogy at this particular 2020s moment defers to the Climate Generation consisting of my own students, the post-millenial Gen Z or iGen born after the 1990s, considered as the first generation to spend an entire lifetime under the impacts of climate change.2 This periodization has also been accorded to the “human-dominated geological epoch” establishing the scientific definition for human-caused crisis recognized by scientist Paul Crutzen as the Anthropocene’s “geology of mankind.”3 The Climate Generation not only bears the responsibility of the rapid demise of the planet, now attributed solely to the human species, but must also bear the anxiety over the future and the emotional labor over what to do with our fossil-fueled, capitalist lifestyle, the redoubtable cause of the destruction to the environment. In respect of the implicit demands on our students, what is our responsibility as professors of art history (in the global context) when such a duty is rarely connected to art or art history? Could a radical pedagogy possibly make a difference in the lives of the Climate Generation? The goal is perhaps better articulated as the need to develop an ethical pedagogical model, which is conceivable through teaching a critical genealogy of environmental performances. This begins with the acknowledgment that the historical subjects of the environment and 297

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performance actually belong in the domain of Indigenous epistemology, philosophy, and ceremony. While no one can deny the value of artistic contributions to environmental advocacy, critics of eco-art question why should these “individual expressions” of the aesthetic program be viewed as any different from the self-serving conceptualist works sold at contemporary art fairs? How are they distinguished from all other status-making endeavors offered in the for-profit circuit of museum to auction house? Based on this ethical problem, my study seeks to understand how environmental performance contributes uniquely to the human-as-nature relationship and thus shares in the ideals of Indigenous knowledge. And rather than foregrounding the artist’s achievement, the hallmark of the performative experience is the artistic engagement with the viewer via emotionality and phenomenological touch. In pedagogical terms, the performative engagement is one that is potentially useful for addressing environmental crisis along with its emotional labor. The politics of hope run parallel to the politics of denial in respect to the overwhelming apathy toward the looming environmental crisis. Historically, the relationship between humans and nature has been ritualized in many cultures (including my own Asian upbringing), with the most well-known conceptions emerging from different Indigenous societies. As explained by Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen “He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat, “the transformative powers of the land speak” because the environment is “the timeless, living ontology” inextricable from the Indigenous mind.4 The ability to learn from Indigenous teachers, such as Wangari Maathai, is key to understanding environmental performance since hers is the iconic ethical model, representing the strategy for “performing trees” in her homeland Kenya. As well, the work of Maori artist Tamati Patuwai examined in this chapter conveys the living ontology of humans-asnature beliefs for Indigenous cultures from the Pacific islands. But in the colonialist context for art history, one that is still taught in universities and colleges in the United States and Europe, indigenous epistemologies and knowledges from global cultures have long been relegated to the non-Western category. Here, Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln’s concept for decolonizing performances is useful for reconciling the complicated issues and histories that have been reductively glossed over by the non-Western category, those which are vastly different in global scope. The authors describe decolonizing performance as a form of “critical pedagogical theater” that can be “viewed as struggles and interventions, performances and performance events [that] can become gendered, transgressive achievements; political accomplishments that break through ‘sedimented meanings and normative traditions’.”5 To this end, decolonizing performances are supported by the theory of the Capitalocene in a rewriting of the Anthropocene, which attributes the beginning of crisis and annihilation for both Indigeneity and the environment to fifteenth-century colonialist capitalism. Based on the Capitalocene timeline, the scene of environmental disaster has already come to pass when acknowledging the long history of the genocide of First Nations. I argue that the nuclear catastrophe in Japan illustrates this disaster nexus by extension into the present of environmental emergency, warranting the fear and anxiety of the Climate Generation. Ultimately though, this chapter questions how a critical genealogy of environmental performances could foster encouragement and hope through the arts, even in the necropolitical conditions of unnatural catastrophes. My exploration of environmental performances, including by Japanese artist Ichi Ikeda, is based on the ways in which they address environmental disaster in culturally local and global ways. Ikeda has promoted the concept of humanity’s “primary relation” to water 298

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since the 1980s, only, his message was made clear to his community decades later in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear accidents.6 The artist explains that he began his career as a chemistry scientist whereby his study of radiation-induced polymerization led to an unanticipated explosion, his subsequent fear of the inability to control or anticipate chemical reactions would be confirmed many years later by the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant disaster resulting from the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Flourishing as an artist rather than as a scientist, the nuclear disaster had strengthened Ikeda’s resolve to work with community members to find courage, strength, and hope by creating environmental performances such as his 5 Greenscapes Shinobazu in 2012. I am inquiring whether a different art-as-humanities approach to crisis can be perceived from an ecological art that functions to advocate change, especially in the aftermath of disasters like Fukushima’s. A radical pedagogy engenders the possibility of radical hope for the Climate Generation through Indigenous epistemology connecting humans back to nature, and through performance’s alternative emotional and sensory opportunities. The separation of culture from nature played an important role in the “Western” enlightenment ideal for a civil society under modern capitalism (in the logic of the scientific divide), one that informs the academic model. While my students must continue to engage in a vocabulary of artistic avant-gardism, it is rarely connected to the underlying “civilizing” ideal for artistic progressivism. A critical genealogy of environmental performance showcases artists who have challenged the nature/culture divide through environmental actions that function as anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist endeavors. As shown in Patuwai’s The River Talks (2013) and in Ikeda’s Wheel of Hope (2013), the final objective of this research is to advocate for non-industrial, non-commodity ways to manage the fear and anxiety that constitute life under the present environmental emergency.

Decolonizing Art History: The Modernist Ideologies of Colonialist Capitalism It would be helpful for a study on the “environment” to situate my own students in the location of the academic institution at California State University, San Bernardino, and a good place to start would be to recognize that the college “sits on the territory and ancestral land of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians (Yuhaaviatam),” a campus that “continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution’s founding in 1965.”7 Also denoted on the CSUSB website, however, is the less than 1% Native American population and the majority 66% Latinx students, with a sizeable representation of the undocumented population that comprises the three million residing in California. The complexity of CSUSB’s student population corresponds to the historical problems of race and ethnicity that define this specific place in Southern California occupied by the state university. Confronting these problems is important to a radical pedagogy if indeed decolonization is not reduced to a metaphor. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang warn that decolonization is not the same as “non-Indigenous peoples making moves to alleviate the impacts of colonization” rather, settler criminalization needs to be understood as structural, “the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. Epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward. Made savage.”8 As revealed by Helen Pruitt Beattie’s 1953 article “Indians of San Bernardino Valley and Vicinity,” the disruption to Indigenous lives in this particular location of culture was especially devastating. 299

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Beattie’s account repeats the propagandist alibi, acknowledging the “military expedition from Mexico” sent by Spain in 1767. To conquer Alta California, and a party of missionary friars went with them to Christianize and civilize the native population. So well did these padres do their work that in slightly more than thirty years, between thirteen and fourteen thousand savages had been baptized and given instruction in the elements of the Christian faith and in many of the arts and industries of civilized life.9 The inscription of the “Americans who came into power in the state a quarter of a century” later presumes the white European origins of “the United States” whereas the prevailing concept of “padres” and “savages” established inexplicably the false identity of foreigner “outsiders.”10 A decolonizing pedagogy, as such, requires vigilance against these false assumptions that perpetuate the neo-colonialist belief in the civilizing mission under the rubric of “the project of modernity” as the acceptable reason for colonization by any culture, including the Spanish conquest of sixteenth-century Mexico. Thus, the tacit rhetoric of “avantgardism,” embedded in the ideals of “modern” and “contemporary” art, as well as the separation of the primitive from the progressive, reinscribes the colonialist ideology in art history more than in any other discipline of the academy. In particular, the European Renaissance is still believed to be the pivotal event of art history, establishing the beginning of modernity by designating the moment of rebirth for art and architecture to fifteenth-century Florence. Every lower division art history survey is organized according to the teleology of the modern with courses from Pre-history to the Renaissance, and then, from the Renaissance to Contemporary Art. Any art history textbook will state as fact the conventional belief that the new industrial humanity of fifteenth-century mercantilism introduced the new capitalist society for the arts, the House of Medici is the very model for art patronage/exchange to this day. In the development of enlightenment values, this art-based conception of the civilized and modern became inextricable from manufacturing, trade and profit, eventually defined by Adam Smith in his 1776 Wealth of Nations as a self-serving civil society, So great, that all are often abundantly supplied; and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.11 The distinction of the “savage” had long represented the uncivilized and primitive peoples outside of capitalism who, from 1450 to 1650, were not only enslaved as a consequence of Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish explorations, but experienced the utter catastrophe of having their homelands taken, stolen, along with the natural resources of their homeland from the Americas to Asia to Africa, all in the name of modernization and civilization. According to Jason Moore, industrial humanity was not a product of the nineteenthcentury industrialization that scientists currently attribute to the Anthropocene (as the beginning of human intervention into the environment) but was the outcome of the ­fifteenth-century inception of profit and capitalism via colonialism’s occupation of cheap nature and cheap labor. Colonization initiated the detrimental impact on the ecology of humans and the planet as a whole: “most humans were part of Nature and this designation worked through the new divisions of labor. An African slave was not part of Society in the new capitalist order.”12 The human species, thereafter, was divided along binary oppositions

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for the savage and the civilized, the primitive and the modern, patriarchal order and cycles of mother earth, which ultimately established the divide between nature and culture. Going by the Capitalocene timeline, Moore agrees with Donna Haraway’s opposition to the Anthropocene’s identification of the “human” as inclusive of all individuals on the planet; the class of “the Anthropos” whose “fossil-fuel-burning humanity doesn’t even speak to all of industrial humanity, but specifically the formations of global capital and global state socialisms.”13 Rethinking life in the age of capital, the term “Capitalocene” recognizes the myopic focus that privileges only certain human relations under Adam Smith’s civil society. The Capitalocene reflects the alternative way that capitalism has overwhelmed the system in which all species-life must circulate, the specific wealth-holding class of civil society’s high-consuming lives are different from other humans living in the so-called developing countries. It’s also important to note that critics of the Anthropocene argue that Crutzen and Eugene Stormer inexplicably look to the scientific advances to solve the environmental crisis from the same industrial-capitalist system they critique.14 Like many environmental artists working since the 1970s, proponents of non-industrial values and ideals seek instead to find environmental solutions from nature, from indigenous knowledges, the purported primitive and the uncivilized.

Performing Trees The activism of Wangari Maathai is exemplary of indigenous rather than industrial solutions to environmental problems today, her life’s work in Kenya constitutes the emblematic example for persistence in the politics of hope. Maathai began her tree-planting initiative in 1976, a famously successful “global movement” that inspired artist Rasheed Araeen to extol her significant influence, “millions of trees have since been planted – and are still being planted every day – all over the world.”15 Maathai was awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her Green Belt Movement, contributing to “sustainable development, democracy and peace.”16 The Nobel website proclaimed that she was the “first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was also the first female scholar from East and Central Africa to take a doctorate (in biology), and the first female professor ever in her home country of Kenya.” Best known for mobilizing the Kenyan community to act on behalf of trees, her opposition to deforestation was political, against the colonization of the forests being cleared by the commercial developers collaborating with the Kenyan elite, the profiteering class led by President Daniel arap Moi. Accused of being a woman who did not “know her place,” Maathai was beaten and arrested multiple times but her Green Belt Movement flourished, begun as a network of 600 community groups that nurtured 6,000 tree nurseries. Her vision continues to this day across continents and cultures; and her initiatives were predicated on her advocacy of Kenyan women who were the farmers of the poorest, rural areas. Maathai, who died in 2011, envisioned treeplanting in the larger global scope, connecting women’s rights to the rights of democracy around the world. Her obituary attributes her Remarkable academic rise to become the first woman to run a university department in Kenya [at the University of Nairobi] due entirely to her closeness to nature. It was the land that showed her and taught her everything, she said.17 Nothing could explain better the life-affirming breadth of Indigenous knowledge than the symbiotic existentialism of Maathai’s human relationship with trees, nature, and her

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environment. Most importantly, she embodied the extraordinary example of an academic who took an eco-feminist stand, whose radical pedagogy actively challenged the industrial commodification of the trees, the forests, and thus, defended her homeland. Artists working in environmental performances share in many of the goals of environmental activists like Maathai. The most prominent example is Joseph Beuys’s ambitious 1982 performative project 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) planted at the site of the Friedericanum museum for documenta 7 (the contemporary art exposition) and throughout the city of Kassel. Not unlike the communal implementation of the Green Belt Movement, the monumental task was successfully completed by 2,500 Kassel citizens as residents, schools, local and neighborhood councils worked together (see Figure 22.1). Here, the locus of the museum represents the enormous difference since the artist “exhibits” his tree-planting work during documenta’s five-year interval rather than solely for the political cause of “sustainable development, democracy and peace.” Neither did Beuys put his life on the line as Maathai did literally because she was a woman working under the patriarchal violence of state domination. Araeen acknowledged the fundamental difference between the work of Beuys and Maathai, the former representing “art in its allegoric cocoon, institutionally legitimized as an achievement of the individual genius, the latter enters life and becomes part of its collective dynamics.”18 Among those dynamics is the educational crossings of Maathai and Barack Obama Sr., the Kenyan father of the US president, both recipients of Kennedy Scholarships to study in the United States during the 1960s period leading up to the independence of their Kenyan homeland from British colonial rule. Citing the shared consciousness connecting Obama and Maathai, and thus “Africa with the Americas,”

Figure 22.1  7000 Oaks, 2022, Bebelplatz, Kassel Germany. The growth of the trees planted in the 1982–1985 period by citizens of Kassel, marked by a planting stone at the Bebelplatz neighborhood of Kassel. Photo courtesy of David Davidson.

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Araeen points to Maathai’s ability to free the creative initiative from Beuys’s “institutional enclave” on behalf of “a vision that wants to change the world for the betterment of all life on earth …. It is this vision that we now need in art.”19 His reference to art’s “institutional enclave” descends from the colonialist teaching of “the Christian faith” that Beatty defined as important to the “arts and industries of civilized life.” I want to assert that Maathai’s transformation of the civilizing mission is clear. The professor at the University of Nairobi elevated Indigenous knowledge to expand a movement, and her activist pedagogy aligns with her academic leadership as head of her university department.

The River Talks While Beuys’s use of artistic conceptualism reflects the late twentieth-century development of performance and what he calls “social sculpture,” the environmental aims of artists went beyond theatrical expression. The global avant-gardism of contemporary art by this time had redefined the conceptualist practice. When performed by Maori artist Tamati Patuwai, for instance, the vocabulary of conceptualism is altered by Indigenous knowledge, and sharing affinity with many works of environmental performance, his proscenium is located at the place of nature. His 2013 performance The River Talks presented on the banks of the Omaru River in Glen Innes, Auckland begins with the sound of a woman’s call, the “karanga (a Māori call to meeting) coming from somewhere up river, among the trees” as described by audience members who were then led by the artist’s speech in his language of Te Reo Māori while Gesturing to the river and back to himself and to the audience. Then he paused and spread his arms out wide. ‘Ko au te awa. Ko te awa ko au. I am the river. The river is me.’ Then more gently he said ‘Look at this river. Get close to it.’ The audience moved together, leaned over the railings, peered down into the river with its film of oil and green gunge – the discarded MacDonald cartons, the Coca Cola can, the old tire. The man spoke again, outraged. ‘If I am this river. If I am this river then what does this river say that I am?’20 Against the modernist assumption that humans are separate from nature, no longer a part of the natural world, a decolonizing production of knowledge returns to the belief that humans are indeed inseparable from nature, the human is the river, as Patuwai suggests. The River Talks presented a series of performances whereby Patuwai served as the river guide and river guardian who narrated, emoted, and chided the audience, transferring the Maori knowledge of kaitiakitanga signifying human relations and obligations to the natural world. The event involved a plethora of different performative actions and movements by other artists along the river: “a singer performed from a raft on the river; two artists spray painted a sail and a chalked figure blessed the water.”21 The overall goal of the event was to enlist the passions of the hundred or so audience members, including leaders of the community, local government, and business representatives, in the effort to act on behalf of the polluted river through community clean-up, legislation, and by promoting awareness. According to Merata Kawharu, the term kaitiakitanga is a rather new iteration, and although possibly emerging from colonialist and past missionary influence, the word has come to represent “the underlying values and cultural convictions [that] have been key facets of Maori life for generations in the management of resources and the promotion of identity.”22 Kaitiakitanga now acknowledges the kind of indigenous perspectives that were considered as backward and primitive by the colonizers. Ever since British missionaries 303

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arrived in New Zealand and established colonial rule in early to mid-nineteenth century, the Maori views and values were denounced as savage, idolatrous, and anti-Christian. The classificatory order for defining the aesthetic arts is predicated on these differences considered as un-Christian ideals of colonized cultures. That is why Maori traditions have not been the subject of Western art historical research, they are still studied as “science” by anthropologists and ethnographers. Kawharu points to the evolution of the term kaitiakitanga in which the common use “implicitly expresses contemporary processes of adapting to new political and legal opportunities.”23 The River Talks illustrates both a Maori ceremonial and a performance art context, much in the same way as the newly devised terminology represents processes of adaptation. However, Patuwai recognizes the ceremonial aspect by clarifying the way in which “kaitiakitanga and manaaki go hand in hand,” making the important point that: Adaptation assumes a responsive act in light of external factors. Given that is the case, the term ‘authentic’ is also a necessary term, in the sense that the work done from a Maori lens, carries the multi-lineal notions of cosmological, theological and metaphysical natures all wrapped into one natural movement. And it is not only a cause of reaction but proactive, holism, that plays out in Kaitiakitanga, that has both an external response AND internal driver. Adaptation yes (nurtured by the relational space); authentic yes (naturally assuming its position in time and space), all with the intention (albeit cosmological) to add Mana to the world.24 Patuwai acknowledges “the layered quandary we have when trying to define Màori reo into English ideas and language.” Here, the change in epistemological practice is made apparent through the cosmological, theological, and metaphysical encounter as the artist exhibits a specific Màori method of performance conceptualism that recognizes adaptation. Many indigenous artists have innovated the performance event to create unique kinds of contemporary art exhibitions. I have written about like-minded initiatives elsewhere including the 2018 multi-layered two-day performance, Cherry River, Where the Rivers Mix.25 Artist Mary Ellen Strom and Crow member and First Nations scholar Shane Doyle presented this event for the communities at large on the banks of the river at the Missouri Headwaters State Park in Montana. Not unlike the renaming of monuments in the United States back to their pre-colonial place names, the Cherry River event was centered around the renaming of the East Gallatin River back to Cherry River, Baáchuuaashe, in Crow, the name long used by many Native American communities living in the Three Forks region. The River Talks and Cherry River: Where the Rivers Mix are performances that reflect the inextricable relationship between humans and nature, representing the ecological priorities of Indigenous ideals. However, these works also exemplify the conceptualism of contemporary art, expressing through the language of performative gestures and embodied actions to connect humans to the “site” of the exhibition. The Minimalist movement in Land Art and performing landscapes, since the 1960s, represented postmodernist developments in the expanded field of sculpture as well as in the performance medium to express through the experience with the site rather than solely engaging with art objects. Other artists in this genealogy of sited performances emphasize social action while recognizing sublime nature, and they include Wu Mali in Taiwan whose Plum Tree Creek project (subtitled Mending the Broken Land with Water) began in 2009 when she learned from a local historian that the dirty and polluted creek’s larger tributary, the Danshui River, was once a flourishing clean stream.26 Wu has been a conceptual video/installation

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artist since the 1970s, and her environmental work is an extension of her performative practice. Functioning as a type of political activism since the 1960s, the performance language shares affinity with feminist/queer/critical race initiatives as artistic challenges to relations of power. In addition, eco-feminist critics such as Carolyn Merchant and Val Plumwood argue that the human domination of nature emerges from aggressions of patriarchal power, much in the way that Maathai had to endure violence as a woman activist in Kenya because she was the leader of the Green Belt Movement. The feminist counter to ecological violence is the conceptualization of reproduction in the broadest sense, encompassing the aims of restoration, renewal, and rebirth of all biological human and earthly life. Artists Dominique Mazeaud’s extended performance The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande (1987–1984), her meditative journey to clean the Sante Fe River, and Shai Zakai’s Concrete Creek (1999–2002), clearing the dumping ground that the creek had become in Ella Valley, Israel, are both considered as eco-feminist exhibitions in the context of contemporary performance art.27 There is no question, however, that their performances had real impacts on the environment, beyond their function as art exhibitions.

Conceptualist Water Artist Ichi Ikeda is a water activist whose subject, material, medium, and concept since the 1980s has centered on water justice, conservation, and renewal in Japan and in other places around the world. Creating large- and small-scale sculptural performances, such as his 80 Liter Water Box, presented in March 2003 at Japan’s Third World Water Forum, Ikeda says he aims “to create symbiotic relationships through actions and to develop my artistic activities with water.”28 The Water Box was his project visualizing the 80 liters per day that every person on earth needs; notwithstanding the fact that three-fourths of the world’s population have access to only 50 liters or less; in Kenya, for instance, each person has access to only five liters, meanwhile “some people in the West use 1000 liters of water per day just watering their lawns and washing their cars.”29 Ikeda’s form of advocacy includes the community as both audiences and participants, sharing mutual environmental objectives and strategies with Tamati Patuwai, Wu Mali, Mary Ellen Strom, and Shane Doyle. In particular, Ikeda’s work expresses the symbiotic relationship between humans, water, and nature. And while he shares the perspectives and goals that Patuwai conveys for Maori performance, Indigenous epistemology is uniquely different because the complexity of kaitiakitanga involves the Maori colonialist past. The use of the term in political discourse is often to claim specific rights of conservation and protection under the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. Kawharu articulates the basis of Tangata whenua (primary custodians of a given geo-political territory, literally ‘­people of the land’). Kaitiakitanga should be defined not only as ‘guardianship’ as has been emphasised by the Crown, local government and some Maori, but also as ‘resource management’… . Kaitiakitanga embraces social and environmental dimensions. ­Human, material and non-material elements are all to be kept in balance.30 The legislation of “I am the river. The river is me” is mandated beyond the terms of artistic practice, the Maori land is inseparable from the Maori people who are guardians over the legacy that was lost to the violence of British colonialism.

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In contrast, Ikeda’s performance process follows the aesthetic program which is for the most part defined by medium and individual expression. He describes the overall improvisational method, Unraveling my entangled self, not some ritual thing. Instead of forming a concept into a shape, my performance sculpture is more like the unraveling of a cord. Nothing surpasses water as a medium of expression. it holds no bodily form and can metamorphose as a living entity.31 While these are implicitly Buddhist concepts, I want to make the distinction by comparison, by which, performance and the body came to be included in the art for art’s sake expression, as opposed to the ritual that Kaitiakitanga serves for the Maori people for nature’s sake. Still, The River Talks also uses individual expression and conceptual methodology to meet ­Patuwai’s decolonizing goals for water. Overall, Ikeda and Patuwai’s artistic endeavors illustrate the complex differences between art historical epistemologies such as Japan’s version of global avant-gardism and the Indigenous knowledges informing the performance for Patuwai’s community – the differences related to historically colonized cultures are distinct although they refer to things that happened in the past Japan’s history as a colonial power, which includes the annexation of the indigenous Ryūkyū territory of Okinawans as well as the occupation of the Ainu territory to the north by Japanese settlers of Hokkaido, the history often subsumed by Japan’s World War II imperialism. Both Ikeda and Patuwai’s artistic actions today are infused with specific historical and political meanings, but what’s often left unacknowledged are the colonialist power structures that shaped both genealogies of performance. Here, it would be erroneous to reduce Ikeda’s water activism to simply a global aesthetic, because, in the legacy of post–World War II Japan, the animosity and violence resulting from wartime imperialism would have profound impact. But it is important to emphasize the way in which Ikeda’s environmental performances express locally for the epistemic politics of radical hope for the generations that came after the 1945 nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Only a worldwide community making efforts to confront environmental disaster could begin to see and understand how Japan’s nuclear history impacts all living things on the planet.

Nuclear Dread Artist Yoshihara Jiro’s 1956 Ruins from Mukogawa River, performed on the river at ­Amagasaki, Japan, represents the Gutai group’s explorations in the aftermath of the nuclear holocaust of atomic bombs dropped in 1945 by the US military on Hiroshima and ­Nagasaki (the scene of apocalyptic disaster that affected humans and the environment equally). Situating his body in the site of the environment, Yoshihara’s aim as the author of the Gutai Manifesto was to question the status of a “dead” art of imperial Japan.32 Since then, Gutai has come into prominence in the Western representation of performance art, their contribution to the development of a global contemporary conceptualism is often correlated with twentieth-century avant-gardism.33 It should be noted that Gutai’s performances and events in 1950s–1960s Japan represented anti-war actions specific to the horrors experienced by the Japanese people. Rejecting traditionalism and Japan’s imperialist past, Gutai looked optimistically to future possibilities through art and technology. Members such as Yoshida Minoru were creating performance sculpture with electric sound devices to acknowledge Japan’s post-war recovery. But by 1970, a new generation of performance artists exemplified by Banpaku 306

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Hakai Kyoto-ha, Destruction Joint-Struggle Group, came together to protest the industrial empire that emerged in the rebuilding of Japan, including the brand new Tsuruga Nuclear Plant. Banpaku’s dissident performances were anti-technology in parallel with anti-industrialization and anti-capitalism at a time when Gutai was more and more implicated in the “term, kankyõ geijutsu (Environment Art), in the late 1960s, both [referred] to spectacles deploying advanced technologies of sound, motion, light, and film.”34 ­Dalai Jee recounts how the Banpaku artists denounced the “foolishly optimistic quest of technology in art” as they took their demonstrations to the street and created morbid scenes by stacking their bodies to dramatic effect.35 Their teach-ins and protests would also involve anti-Vietnam-war resistance. Foreseeing Japan’s nuclear-energy risks in the generation leading up to the Fukushima disaster, many artists would later acknowledge the “nuclear dread” (kaku no kyofu) that threatened humanity with its potential for inevitable destruction.36 Since 1997, the artist Kenji Yanobe performed this “nuclear dread” in his iconic protective Atom Suit, a fully functional hazmat gear replete with radiation-detecting Geiger counter. He first donned the suit at the ghost town of Pripyat near Chernobyl after the 1986 nuclear reactor meltdown, his artistic objective at the time was to question whether humans could really protect themselves from atomic annihilation. By emplacing his human body in the ruins of Chernobyl’s environmental disaster, he provoked the memory of the devastating landscapes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki while eerily foretelling the 2011 scene of the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. The Atom Suit persona was a nod to the 1950s–1960s childhood figure, the Manga character Tetsuwan-Atomu, graphic artist Osamu Tezuka’s “Atom Boy,” which Yanobe also invokes in the context of his return to Chernobyl’s nursery school and Ferris wheel fairgrounds. In the haunting image of Atom Suit Project: Bumper Car (1997), his performance at the rusted-out kiddy ride mourns the loss of innocence and childhood joy in the aftermath of nuclear crisis. Yanobe retired the atom suit in 2003, but in 2011 after the Fukushima accident, he recreated the image as a 20-foot statue in a special memorial to symbolize a “world free of nuclear disaster.”37 Titled the Sun Child, the figure holds his helmet by his side to show he can breathe the air freely. In 2018, Yanobe donated Sun Child to the city of Fukushima and installed it in front of a children’s center. In less than a month, the city announced that the sculpture would be removed due to the upsettingly bad memories and emotions that the statue caused among people in the community. Rather than symbolizing optimism for the future, it was a reminder of Fukushima’s nuclear disaster, the worst of its kind since Chernobyl. The statue and the performance resulted in different interpretations. When Yanobe performed in his Atom Suit, he was able to connect with the community’s fear and anxiety on a human-to-human scale whereas the huge statue of the Sun Child signified an immovable monument to nuclear apocalypse – the people have yet to recover from the disaster. Rather than creating statuary to memorialize disaster, environmental performances function cathartically to confront the difficult emotions that stay embodied in human memory.

The Dharma Wheel of Hope Ichi Ikeda’s 2012 performative installation, the 5 Greenscapes project in Tokyo, offered a vastly different form of memorialization. In the year directly following the 2011 tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear accident, Ikeda brought together 500 participants to create his 307

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Greenscapes in Shinobazu Pond, Ueno Park, a well-known tourist spot in the middle of Tokyo. The main program of the National Urban Greenery Fair organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the Greenscapes project included Wheel of Hope’s three lifesized vertical rings made from reeds grown in the area (Figure 22.2). “Waterway viewing” through the Wheel of Hope was Ikeda’s creation of an extended perspective, providing a kaleidoscopic view through the vertical rings across the life of the green pond, once filled with “empty cans discarded, a few remnants of bicycles, branded bags, laptops, and needles. The lotus-covered pond becomes a carefree garbage dump where no complaints are received.”38 The community performers led by Ikeda renewed and reshaped the entire pond to clear the water of suffocating lotus and to create four “water paths,” each envisioning a different landscape. Ikeda explains how the title Wheel of Hope reflects a comment made by one who “saw the Pure Land in the misty world that rises up ahead of what I desire. In the midst of the deepening confusion in the world, perspectives toward the light appear like the hopes of each person.”39 Invoking the dharma wheel, Buddhist sutras (as conceived in Japan) recognize the Pure Land’s “world of another dimension,” as the experience of life in the now, in the present, but viewed from the perspective of the next life to come.40 This hopeful viewpoint through the Wheel of Hope emerged from Ikeda’s effort to potentially bring people closer through the Fukushima tragedy, recognizing how greenscapes could engage humans in an embodied communal action – not to mention that scientists have documented the way that “green space functions to reduce air pollutants, to reduce temperatures, and to improve rainfall types,” which greatly affects global warming.41 And as discussed earlier,

Figure 22.2  Ichi Ikeda, Wheel of Hope, part of the 5 Greenscapes project (2012), Shinobazu Pond, Ueno Park, Tokyo.

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the artist is known for his 1990s explorations involving the human’s “primary relations to water,” he has long advocated for people to “realize that water, source of our lives, is the medium to move beyond borders, everyday customs, histories and cultures, in order to realize the profound exchange between human beings and environment.”42 The decolonizing exchange expressed by environmental performance can offer radical hope through non-commodity-based experiences: through emotionality and the sense of community. The bodily-oriented engagement problematizes the way in which materialist objectification is all-consuming in everyday life – the dynamic sense of human connection with each other and with the local landscape changes our technological perspective. Ikeda’s Wheel of Hope provides a focal point through the ocular lens of reeds, stretching out into Shinobazu Pond and Ueno Park, the viewer experiences a sensory effect through the kaleidoscope of nature. Only nature can create this emotional engagement, one that resonates poignantly in our time of environmental disasters. Through a Buddhist inflection of hope, Ikeda acknowledges the personal impact of the nuclear accident that had Broken down the community and divided each of us into individuals according to their position and environment… . Inevitably, dreams become more diverse. Therefore, the ‘landscape of hope’ becomes a diverse and complex system in which each of us sees our own hopes. It is a complex world of water, light, lotus flowers, and wild birds etc. Unlike the static and monolithic values presented by paintings and sculptures, it emerges as a slowly changing dynamic. Hope is like a living thing, releasing a new life force. It is on a journey through time, wandering in a kaleidoscope to find each own dream. Each person collects fragments of hope that appear in complex systems and unravel his/her own world of hope. In this sense, we can say that it is the hope of each of us within hope.43 Fukushima’s crisis illustrates the high stakes of maintaining the hyper-capitalist industrial lifestyle in the Anthropocene’s third great age of carbon. Scientists Crutzen and Stoermer devised the geological epoch to implicate all humans in the urgent demise of the planet. As humans continue to live high-energy-consuming materialist lifestyles, it bears reiterating the way in which the divide between nature and culture was a product of the founding moment in capitalism when the ontological status imposed upon colonized populations was first deemed “primitive’ and “uncivilized.” The wealth-holding “class” of industrial humanity was established to the exclusion and detriment of other humans, indigenous peoples under occupation along with those made into slaves and “primitives.” The important point is that this inexorable human disaster was also an environmental disaster. The book Radical Hope by Jonathan Lear examines the deepest state of despair through the historical subject of Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow in Montana: “when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere.”44 The devastating loss of Indigenous life in the United States created by colonization is the same as the loss of environmental life in the very worst possible scenario under the powers of empire, materialism, and industrial capitalism. To Lear, Plenty Coups represents radical hope, because he “never abandoned the idea that he had been given a vision that derived from the spiritual world,” even when white settlers broke land treaties and infected his community with disease.45 Radical hope kept his people from complete generational extinction, and in the broader context of the Capitalocene, the conditions are the same for the Climate Generation who must find hope and non-industrial ways to confront their fear and anxiety over the environmental crisis. 309

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Notes 1 The monumental works of Minimalism are largely attributed to the generation of male artists, from Robert Smithson to Michael Heizer. 2 See Sarah Jaquette Ray, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 3. 3 Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (January 3, 2002): 23. 4 Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen, “He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat, “The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred,” Space and Culture 9, no. 4 (November 2006): 367. 5 Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, “Critical Methodologies and Indigenous Inquiry,” in Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, eds., Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2008), 7. Cited, Dwight Conquergood, “Beyond the Text: Toward a Performative Cultural Politics,” in Sheron J. Dailey, ed., The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions (Annandale, VA: National Communication Association, 1998), 32. 6 Hiroko Shimizu, “Japanese Atomic Age Art: Ichi Ikeda Interview,” WEAD Women Eco Artists Dialog #5., 2012 https://directory.weadartists.org/japanese-anti-nuclear-art-ichi-ikeda-interview 7 https://www.csusb.edu/tribal-relations 8 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Ðecolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 5. 9 Helen Pruitt Beattie, “Indians of San Bernardino Valley and Vicinity,” The Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly 35, no. 3 (September, 1953): 239. 10 Beattie, “Indians of San Bernardino Valley and Vicinity,” 239. 11 Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Random House, 1937), 2. 12 Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 88. 13 Donna Haraway and Martha Kenney, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhocene,” in Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, eds., Art in the Anthropocene (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 259. 14 See Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene’,” IGBP Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. 15 Rasheed Araeen, “Wangari Maathai Africa’s Gift to the World,” Third Text 23, no. 5 (September, 2009): 675. 16 https://www.greenbeltmovement.org/what-we-do; see also https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/ peace/2004/maathai/facts/ 17 John Vidal, “Wangari Maathai Obituary,” The Guardian (26 September 2011). 18 Araeen, “Wangari Maathai Africa’s Gift to the World,” 675. 19 Araeen, “Wangari Maathai Africa’s Gift to the World,” 675. 20 Sasha Matthewman, Molly Mullen, and Tamati Patuwai, “The River Talks: an Ecocritical ‘Kōrero’ About Ecological Performance, Community Activism and ‘Slow Violence’,” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 20, no. 4 (2015): 442–443. 21 Matthewman, et al., “The River Talks,” 442. 22 Merata Kawharu, “Kaitiakitanga: A Maori Anthropological Perspective of the Maori Socio-­ Environmental Ethic of Resource Management,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 109, no. 4 (December 2000): 350. 23 Kawharu, “Kaitiakitanga: A Maori Anthropological Perspective,” 350. 24 Tamati Patuwai in correspondence with the author, dated December 21, 2021. 25 See my article, “Cherry River: Art, Music, and Indigenous Stakeholders of Water Advocacy in Montana,” Case Studies in the Environment 6, no. 1 (2022): 1–14. See also my essay “Environment, Labor, and Video: (Eco)feminist Interpellations of Chineseness in the Work of Yuk King Tan, Cao Fei, and Wu Mali,” Staging Art and Chineseness: Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2020).

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Environmental Performances and the Politics of Hope 26 See “Environment, Labor, and Video: (Eco)feminist Interpellations of Chineseness in the Work of Yuk King Tan, Cao Fei, and Wu Mali,” Staging Art and Chineseness:Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2020), pp. 89–122. 27 I have discussed the Zakai and Mazeaud’s works in my article “Performance Art, Performativity, and Environmentalism in the Capitalocene,” The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, ed. Paula Rabinowitz (2019). 28 John K. Grande,”Water Mirror: A Conversation with Ichi Ikeda,” Sculpture (September 2007): 22. 29 Grande, “Water Mirror,” 25. 30 Kawharu, “Kaitiakitanga: A Maori Anthropological Perspective,” 349. 31 Grande, “Water Mirror,” 22. 32 Alexandra Munroe, Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky, tr. Reiko Tomii, tr. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1994), 57. Gutai’s exploration of the relationship between humans and environment contributed to the performance art medium as a radical nonobject-based practice. Japanese artists of the “action painting” including Red Hi Center artists of the 1950–1960s Yoshihara Michio, Murakami Saburo, Tanaka Atsuko, and many others are now included in the global challenge to the Eurocentric painting-sculpture tradition. 33 Beginning with the postwar hapuningu (happenings) generation and with Action Painting in the 1950s–1960s, Shiraga Kazuo, Shimamoto Shozo, and Yoshihara Jiro were at the forefront of performances of painting – instead of a brush, the painter uses his feet or throws paint on the canvas. These artists also collaborated with Informel artists in Europe who also collaborated with artists like Georges Mathieu in the United States. 34 DalaiJee, “Performance Art and/as Activism,” 165. 35 Kuro DalaiJee, “Performance Art and/as Activism: Expo ‘70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society, 23 (December, 2011): 165. For more information about Expo 70s example in the industrialization showcase, see my essay “Biennial as a Discursive Political System for Contemporary Art,” Contemporary Art in the Global Framework, eds. Amelia Jones and Jane Chin Davidson (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2023). 36 See Bert Winther-Tamaki, “To Put on a Big Face: The Globalist Stance of Okamoto Taro’s Tower of the Sun for the Japan World Exposition,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 23 (­December 2011) pp. 81–101. 37 Taylor Dafoe, “This Giant Sculpture of a Child in a Hazmat Suit Was Meant to Inspire Hope— Then People Got Creeped Out,” Artnet, August 30, 2018. 38 Ichi Ikeda, Earth Art Manual (Tokyo: TPAF, 2020), 242. 39 From correspondence between Ichi Ikeda and the author, December 31, 2021. 40 See Fujita Kōtatsu and Rebecca Otowa, “The Origin of the Pure Land,” The Eastern Buddhist 29, no. 1 (Spring 1996) pp. 33–51. 41 Hiroko Shimizu, “Japanese Atomic Age Art: Ichi Ikeda Interview,” WEAD Women Eco Artists Dialog #5., 2012 https://directory.weadartists.org/japanese-anti-nuclear-art-ichi-ikeda-interview 42 Shimizu, “Japanese Atomic Age Art: Ichi Ikeda Interview.” 43 Ichi Ikeda, Earth Art Manual (Tokyo: TPAF, 2020), 242. 44 Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: ­Harvard, 2006), 2. 45 Lear, Radical Hope, 113.

Selected Bibliography Chin Davidson, Jane. 2019. “Performance Art, Performativity, and Environmentalism in the Capitalocene.” In The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, ed. Paula Rabinowitz DOI: 10.1093/ acrefore/9780190201098.013.93. ——— 2020. “Environment, Labor, and Video: (Eco)feminist Interpellations of Chineseness in the Work of Yuk King Tan, Cao Fei, and Wu Mali.” In Staging Art and Chineseness: Politics of Trans/ Nationalism and Global Expositions. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. 89–122. ——— 2022. “Cherry River: Art, Music, and Indigenous Stakeholders of Water Advocacy in Montana.” Case Studies in the Environment, Vol. 6, No. 1: 1–14.

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Jane Chin Davidson Conquergood, Dwight. 1998. “Beyond the Text: Toward a Performative Cultural Politics.” In The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions, ed. Sheron J. Dailey. Annandale, VA: National Communication Association. Crutzen, Paul J. 2002. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature, no. 415 (January 3): 23. Haraway Donna and Martha Kenney. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhocene.” Art in the Anthropocene, eds. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin. London: Open Humanities Press. Kawharu, Merata. 2000. “Kaitiakitanga: A Maori Anthropological Perspective of the Maori SocioEnvironmental Ethic of Resource Management.” The Journal of the Polynesian Society, Vol. 109. No. 4 (December).No. 1 (Spring): 349–370. Kōtatsu, Fujita and Rebecca Otowa. 1996. “The Origin of the Pure Land.” The Eastern Buddhist, Vol. 29. Matthewman, Sasha, Molly Mullen and Tamati Patuwai. 2015. “The River Talks: an Ecocritical ‘Kōrero’ About Ecological Performance, Community Activism and ‘Slow Violence’.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Vol. 20, No. 4: 442–463. Moore, Jason W. ed. 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism.Oakland, CA: PM Press. Ray, Sarah Jaquette. 2020. A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety. Oakland: University of CA Press. Sheridan, Joe and Roronhiakewen. 2006. ““He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat. “The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred.”” Space and Culture, 9, no. 4 (November): 365–381

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SECTION IV

Sensing and Seeing

23 SPOOKY ART HISTORY (OR, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE POSTCOLONIAL?) Kajri Jain

Spook (/spō͞ok/) noun: spook; plural noun: spooks INFORMAL: a ghost. INFORMAL • NORTH AMERICAN: a spy. “a CIA spook” OFFENSIVE • DATED: a Black person.1

Living with Ghosts Unlike resting souls that lapse peacefully out of circulation, ghosts accumulate, and with it their agitation. It’s getting stifling, as roiling crowds of unquiet ghosts disorientingly crash times and spaces up against each other, turbulent in summer’s humidity. Surrounding us for decades as so many of us remained oblivious, their traces are surfacing thick and fast. Traces that were buried, sometimes literally, like the hundreds of children’s bodies in unmarked graves at Canadian residential schools. Or staring us in the face, like the statues of Confederate leaders and colonial capitalists (Cecil Rhodes, Edward Colston, James McGill) festering in civic spaces, visible yet somehow impalpable to the senses and unassimilable to sense until eruptions of dissent and defacement exhumed their obscenity. And then there are traces like the wayward heat and storms that impress into our own obscenely surviving skins the myriad silent disappearances of other lifeways and species—and the emergence of others, like what Laurie Anderson calls the virus that looks like a dog toy: six and a half million more ghosts, and counting.2 The air is heavy. Oppressive, we might say: but these oppressions are felt and dealt with unevenly, on fluctuating spectrums of scale, depth, speed, and intensity. Art history is a spooky discipline, no doubt about it. Not only because of the spectral Whiteness pervading it from its very origins, ironically and uncannily entangling violence with beauty in the works we attend to and how, their production and circulation, the spaces they inhabit, the lovely writing they inspire (Georges Didi-Huberman rightly calls art history “our beautiful discipline”).3 More fundamentally, and part and parcel of its Whiteness, it is still permeated by the spectral Spirit that emerged as secular humanism sublimated 315

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religion into art: the spirit of peoples, periods, civilizations, nations, cultures, dare I say identities, in whose name art history has too often reduced images to a function of their (­putatively) originary context. A hierarchical spectrum of periods and places of origin still constitutes the discipline’s organizing institutional logic in the Anglophone academy, even as it embraces circulation, exchange, border crossing, and anachronism, turning spatiotemporal origins into another simulacrum. And as the spectral force of origins and originality continues to exert its own material efficacy, so do innumerable virtual incarnations of images, actual and virtual coalescing in evanescent online attestations of presence (Instagram selfies with artworks; the Carters’ 2018 Apeshit; NFT art). Humanist Spirit jostles in the ether with inhuman, posthuman object-spirits and their transitive, distributed “agency,” but also with powerful reclamations of humanity that occupy and reconfigure the “master’s” house, of which the museum is a paradigmatic, indeed egregious, instance.4 For these ghosts don’t cancel each other out, they just crowd together ever more tightly in fraught, anguished coexistence. And so it goes for postcolonialism, another tired wraith whose unfinished business still haunts the discipline even as we (re)embrace and retool the language of decolonization to challenge ongoing colonialisms, primarily in settler colonial contexts without recourse to the nationalism—however vexed—of earlier movements. I am in solidarity with this retooling and sympathetic to its necessity, as I will explain. But also, given certain aspects of decolonization’s institutional and public uptake, I find myself wanting to write from and about the unheimlich—uncanny, unbelonging—space of my postcolonialist intellectual formation, in this peculiar moment of postcolonialism’s (and my own) becoming-spectral, lest a similar fate befall decolonization. So I will come at questions of sensing and seeing in my work via a circuitous, zoomed-out reflection on what killed postcolonialism in North American Anglophone art history, and how our already spooky discipline might think of living with its ghosts, amongst all the others.

The “Post” in Postcolonialism, Redux I don’t see postcolonialism and decolonizing movements in their latest avatar—let’s call them, after Zoe Todd, Decolonization 2.0—as fundamentally different in their intellectual and political aims.5 These are, at base, to identify and undo the legacies of colonialism, legacies whose physical, economic, epistemic, psychic, social, political, aesthetic, and other aspects are all salient and cannot be thought apart. (Hence the necessarily transdisciplinary nature of these projects.) The difference between the “-ism” in postcolonialism and the “-ing” in decolonizing suggests a difference of emphasis in registers of practice, between the primarily conceptual, critical, and academic bent of the former and the primarily activist, public, restitutive, resurgent bent of the latter.6 This is partly misleading, for both vehemently oppose a separation between “theory” and “practice,” but it is also justified as a matter of degree. So while these projects cannot be conflated, they are not opposed either. This understanding is not universally shared, however. The term “postcolonial” is subject to renewed interrogation by those who see its “post” as implying that colonialism is over, not—as I, and others, have understood it—as addressing how we are all living in its wake, albeit experiencing this differently depending on who and where we are.7 Decolonization sends a much stronger and clearer political signal, particularly in relation to situations of ongoing settler colonialism and White privilege, even where state power is no longer in majority White hands. When students in South Africa put decolonization forcefully back on the agenda for universities and public institutions in 2015 with the #RhodesMustFall 316

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movement, this dovetailed with existing protests in North America against continuing institutionalized racism and other legacies of colonialist exploitation and dispossession: slavery, land theft, expropriation. Of course, these protests did not start with Black Lives Matter and Land Back; as Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Eve Tuck remind us, “Indigenous peoples have engaged in the critique of settler colonialism since at least 1492.”8 But as decolonization has rightly gained fresh currency, how did postcolonialism come to imply the opposite of what it intended? The anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot identified a similar reversal in the concept of culture as it emerged from his discipline into the public sphere. Trouillot brilliantly described how, in anthropology, culture was initially intended as a concept that was meant to subvert race-based accounts of non-Western societies, but eventually came in public discourse to do the same essentializing work as race.9 Following Trouillot, rather than seeing postcolonialism’s departure from its original nuance merely as a misunderstanding, it may be more productive to place its career within a broader institutional and social-political context—indeed, the same context that Trouillot deals with. Postcolonialism’s limited traction in the North American academy in general and art history in particular, and the attendant turn in both to the language of decolonization, illuminates both the promises of, and the risks for, decolonization. I offer not a distanced overview, but perspectives from the varying sites and scales of my own experience as a woman of color working in North American art history on modern and contemporary South Asian images, between the “unfriendly” “incommensurability” of fragile “contingent coalitions” and the performatively friendly, all-too-civil hostility of entrenched neo/liberal institutions.10 Postcolonialism as I experienced it emerged in the Anglophone academy hard on the heels of Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism (particularly deconstruction), and postmodernism, along with cultural studies, subaltern studies, and queer theory. It worked with and on anticolonial writing, cultural production, and archives from—including colonialist representations of—peoples and places subject to European imperialism. It analyzed these materials to describe the forms of colonial oppression, past and present, intangible and tangible: how these came to be embedded in institutions, knowledge, and everyday experience, but also how they have been resisted. Indeed, this questioning of received knowledges, histories, practices, and structures was both an act of resistance in itself and a resource for decolonizing activism. This scholarship primarily centered on the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, overlapping in turn with Africa and the African diaspora, particularly the “Black Atlantic” including Britain, France, and the Americas; South Asia (predominantly Bengal) and its diaspora; West Asia and Northern Africa, a.k.a. the “Middle East,” which, via Edward Said’s Orientalism, served as a synecdoche for an “Orient” (another efficacious phantasm) extending to East and Southeast Asia; Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania; and the Chicanx and Latinx “borderlands,” as Gloria Anzaldúa called them— though not so much Latin America itself.11 Note the kinds of exchanges and mixtures in this list: postcolonialism’s concerns with anticolonial thought, diaspora, hybridity, and subalternity challenged Western versions of nationalism and modernity. In terms of objects of study, postcolonialism has attended to cultural and theoretical work by both colonizers and the post/colonized, encompassing a range of forms across art, literature, popular culture, and mass media as well as historical archives, particularly those pertaining to colonial law and governmentality. Here it has both followed and inspired artistic production: in Britain, for instance, postcolonialism was shaped by close exchanges between the Black Arts Movement and the post-Marxist cultural studies of Stuart Hall, Kobena Mercer, and others, via an institutional ecology that included the University of 317

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Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the journal Third Text, and Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts). Postcolonialism’s analyses unfolded from the start via conversations across regions, and across homelands and diasporas, in the spirit of a solidarity forged through a common commitment to broadly leftist anticolonial thought and politics. It also called for approaches both drawing and reflecting on multiple disciplines, provoking much ethical introspection in some of them, particularly anthropology. I, for one, found that reading outside my discipline and area helped denaturalize the master categories that have become our academic stock in trade, but which everyday life in the postcolony (that is, everywhere) troubles and exceeds. For art history, these categories include art, history, culture, visuality, the aesthetic, medium, modernity, nation, capitalism, nature, and religion; doubtless there are others. To me, doing postcolonial art history that lends itself to decolonization means attending to how images push back against these categories while also reckoning with the efficacy of these frames in the world. This requires attending to everyday life in the postcolony and to vernacular forms as well as master languages, colonial and otherwise: forms of speech, expression, circulation or economy, sensory and affective regimes, epistemes.12 Attending to these vernacular forms is useful not just for understanding “local” non-Western contexts but also because they illuminate how the conceptual categories and epistemic frames of modernity’s Western self-narrativizations fail to describe the constitutive unevenness of actually existing modernities everywhere, not least in the West.13 But such vernaculars have been consigned to anthropological specificity rather than mounting a concerted, albeit cacophonous, challenge to the universalizing-yet-provincial institutional frameworks underpinning disciplinary business as usual.14 In other ways, too, postcolonialism’s institutional uptake in North American art history has rendered it toothless for decolonization, its very strengths becoming weaknesses: that is, its conversations across the Global South and its diasporas, metropolitan and otherwise, and the theoretical approaches and vocabularies that made these possible.

Where and When We Stand: On Indigenous Land Among Eurocentric disciplines in the Anglophone academies, postcolonialism’s greatest impact has to have been in departments of English and comparative literature. This is consistent with postcolonialism’s focus on texts—and images treated as texts to be “read”— in keeping with the intellectual currents of its emergence in the 1970s. Postcolonialism’s predominantly literary and textualist alignment with deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and critical theory in general gave it a reputation as turgid and forbidding—indeed, effectively exclusionary; hence the need for the no less sophisticated but more accessible and often poetic analyses offered by Decolonization 2.0. It was also seen as overly caught up in semiotics, if not metaphorics—that is, in the terms of the materialist critique within postcolonialism in its heyday, presenting “the World according to the Word.”15 A formalism where radical gestures in art somehow translate to radical politics is also very familiar to art history and criticism. Decolonization, by contrast, in Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s oft-quoted phrase, is not a metaphor, for it puts at the front and center of analysis and action the continued dis/possession, resignification, and transformation of land and the social-ecological devastation wrought by settler colonial developmentalism (which includes its obverse, Romantic environmentalism).16

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This focus on land was not in postcolonialism’s initial toolkit, even as it was being pursued elsewhere (in Marxist and feminist cultural geography, Native American Studies, and some strands of “new materialism”). This was of a piece with postcolonialism’s relatively scant discussion of Indigeneity as what Jodi Byrd pithily terms “actionable in the present.”17 As Byrd, Rowe and Tuck, and others have pointed out, these absences have similarly characterized much cultural studies-inflected scholarship, including in queer, feminist, critical race, and affect studies. In North American art history, too, up until about the 2010s (as the work of Indigenous scholars entered mainstream academic circulation) but even now, references to Indigeneity have commonly reduced it to “sign and event,” devolving either to colonialist representation and its persistence or to primitivist moments of liberatory alterity.18 Subtly and perniciously (particularly given their critical claims), in both modalities these approaches render Indigeneity untimely, uncoeval, ghostly; Byrd invokes the figure of the zombie. Further, the narrative ultimately remains one of the colonial encounters, past or present, and therefore of the colonizer as the primary agent of history. Postcolonialism’s elision of a spatiality and temporality that attest to Indigenous presence, present-ness, and futures accounts for the polarization between postcolonialism and what came to be called “settler colonialism studies.” In some formulations, ex-colonized nations’ achievement of formal statehood lends a temporal aspect to this polarization.19 Here the “event” of independence is construed as consigning colonialism to the past, in opposition to Patrick Wolfe’s description of settler colonialism as a “structure, not an event.”20 However, counterposing postcolonialism’s “post” to ongoing settler colonialism has two unfortunate effects. First, losing sight of the co-constitution and continued entanglements of settler and non-settler colonialisms thwarts a fulsome analysis of settler colonialism as a structure and its protean contemporary forms, including the replication of settler colonialism within the ex-colonies.21 Second, this itself replicates the colonialist logics of spatial elision and uncoevalness, transferring invisibility onto the contemporary legacies of colonialism in the Global South. But let me immediately emphasize again that this polarization is most usefully seen as a symptom of the very colonial structures that decolonization seeks to analyze and challenge. It is the tenacity of deep institutional asymmetries and colonial structures of privilege that attempts (increasingly unsuccessfully!) to consign all forms of postcoloniality in the present to a spectral condition. This is what spawns the analytical fragmentations that keep in place our given categories and militate against thinking, as Lisa Lowe puts it, “relation across differences rather than equivalence [and] the convergence of asymmetries rather than the imperatives of identity.”22 North American art history is one site of such institutionalized asymmetries that enable the discipline—and colonial structures—to carry on with business as usual. A key force in perpetuating these asymmetries is the mobilization of “cultural” and other identities, forcing differences into competitive equivalence by rendering them commensurable on the terrain of a given sameness—the givens being White privilege (social, political, economic, and epistemic dominance) and a neo/liberal conception of “the market.” Even as postcolonial, decolonizing, and other minoritarian (as opposed to “minority”) scholars, activists, and artists disavow identity politics, we are caught in institutional structures that materialize and reinforce this on an everyday basis (not least through “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” initiatives). Trouillot’s take on culture is relevant here not just as a homology but in its own right, as essentializing “culture” becomes the fraught nexus between neoliberal multiculturalism (with its “culture wars”) and the liberal humanist cultural-civilizational Spirit that

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permeates the spatiotemporal categories of art history and organizes its c­ urricula, hiring, funding, publishing, and intellectual exchanges.

The Mystery of the Missing Tricontinental North American institutions, particularly the academy and the art world, consolidate ethnic, religious, and otherwise identitarian silos competing for resources, representation, and recognition, while White—that is, descended from Europe and its settler colonial ­diaspora—remains the unhyphenated, unidentified, default master identity.23 In the US academy in particular, hyphenated silos, often appearing as subsets of American Studies, are sequestered from other regional silos arising from the geopolitical logic of area studies (which informs, for instance, the burgeoning interest in the Islamic world after 9/11). Here the colonialist strategy of divide and rule converges with the capitalist strategies of divide and sell (niche marketing) and branding, alongside behind-the-scenes “accumulation by dispossession.”24 This logic of fragmentation permeates both art history and art practice, as artists are burdened with the responsibility to perform and represent their identities, and art historians, critics, and curators with explicating and promoting them through this lens. This problem has long been recognized on both sides of the Atlantic but remains tenacious nonetheless.25 Such fragmentation maintains the status quo by weakening the conditions for intersectional solidarities or for trans-regional exchanges beyond those dictated from above by the geopolitics of security, trade, and manufacture (for instance, unlike among NGOs, South Asia-Africa or South Asia-South America conversations other than those under the aegis of BRICS have not been funded or promoted in the academy with the same zeal as India-China exchanges). These geopolitical forces are exacerbated in North America by a deeply provincial, insular, if not solipsistic public culture with little inclination or motivation to educate itself about the geography, histories, and complex post-independence presents of the Global South—again, other than for state security, trade, and tourism.26 To some extent all national publics by definition focus on “their own” history, politics, and cultural traditions; the USA’s national heritage clearly crystallized around a White settler formation whose global economic ascendancy by the early twentieth century made its elites eager to establish themselves as the heirs to European “civilization.” But there are profound asymmetries in the extent to which national publics are aware of others, and which of those others are universally known. This asymmetry ranges from the banal to the scholarly. At one level, for instance, it hit me when I first visited New York and found myself on Bleecker Street: how come I, raised in Australia, the UK, and India, had even heard of this street, let alone developed a second-hand affection for it, whereas the non-South Asians there would likely never know Bareilly’s bazaar, also rendered mythic in popular song? At another level, as I tell graduate students working on the non-West, we need to do double or triple the work: we have to know about Western art, history, philosophy, sociology, and political theory (etc.) in order to even begin to perceive how our objects trouble received frames and categories. Our work is always also an anthropology of art history, always-already comparative, never just interdisciplinary but also para-disciplinary. North America’s insularity may seem counterintuitive given its multicultural make-up. I was certainly surprised by this when I began teaching courses in Toronto on the visual

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culture of colonialism and modern and contemporary Indian art and cinema. In the former I encounter the understandable sentiment of students wanting to leave behind spaces from which their families have journeyed to a safer, more benign and prosperous e­ nvironment— for them, that is, not for those Canada continues to dispossess. For many from immigrant families, those spaces are consigned to a personal, autobiographical past (although others—particularly Arab and Muslim students politicized by Islamophobia and Zionism, from which our institutions are far from exempt—readily connect postcolonial presents in the homeland and the diaspora). Similarly, for modern and contemporary art and film, there’s “too much history” in courses that are supposed to be about the present, as though the present is homogeneous, flat, even, and universally shared. In the essentialist version of culture deeply naturalized in many students you can have either culture or history, not both. (This is also a version of culture that sees culture as property, generating an impassioned discourse of cultural appropriation whose proprietary logic—again, “the market” as given—too often lacks an analytic of power.27) Thus, students of South Asian descent with limited experience of the region look to its art and film to speak, in a familiar language, to diasporic identitarian concerns.28 Much contemporary art lends itself to this, thanks to the shared idioms of the global art market and exhibition spaces. So does popular Indian cinema, which thrives on and addresses its diasporic audiences, though in ideologically different ways from contemporary art. But both also engage subcontinental politics, histories, and, crucially, languages, formal idioms, and regimes of sense and value. If art history’s strength is, as I believe, its object-centered approach, it must be responsive to the multiple processes, forces, and emergences coursing through these objects and coming into varied assemblages at different sites and moments. The Other’s evacuation from temporality—and hence art history—paradoxically persists despite this being one of the key insights of Said’s Orientalism, lucidly explicated for art historians by Linda Nochlin.29 But Orientalism describes the structures of colonial fantasy, not the everyday present of the colonized that Said addressed in his later work on settler colonial Israel/Palestine. North American art history in its provincialism embraced Orientalism as an influential text for studying the art of Europe and its colonial diaspora, albeit critically and against the grain. This modality of postcolonialism performatively re-centers attention onto the colonizer and the colonial encounter, staying on familiar territory—both literally and figuratively—rather than venturing out to the ex-colonies. Indeed, arguably even Said’s work on Palestine was largely recuperated to a subset of postcolonial studies concerned with diaspora and exile—in other words, predicated on metropolitan locations from which disparate homelands are remembered, consigned again to the past (it was Patrick Wolfe who brought North American, Australian, and Israeli settler colonialisms into the same frame). This diasporic lens is, of course, one shared by many artists and postcolonial intellectuals, as well as a significant student demographic. In short, to somewhat overstate this for polemical purposes (after all, I do hold a senior tenured position here, though I’m constantly mistaken for an anthropologist!): North American art history has reduced postcolonialism to a primarily navel-gazing exercise focused either on the colonial encounter and colonial representation or on diasporas in metropolitan spaces. The Global South is relegated to a “post” as past, or to distant, distinct “cultural” capsules with no relation to our everyday lives other than as autobiography, tourist destination, or geopolitical threat. No wonder decolonization has no use for this.

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Both “either/or” and “and, and, and…” So how might the spirit of postcolonialism permeate a decolonizing art history, beyond its obfuscating letter(s) and its North American zombie life that does the master’s bidding? Let me finally circle back to the theme of “Sensing and Seeing,” to at least schematically illustrate how a postcolonialist (rather than identitarian or culturalist) attention to non-Western images and their attendant regimes—not just of meaning, but also of value, efficacy, and sensation/perception—can denaturalize certain Euroamerican assumptions underpinning the discipline. Again, this denaturalization is necessary not just to understand “non-­Western” images but those produced in and for the West as well, beyond art history’s secular humanism with its default liberal bourgeois aesthetic subject. We might think of this as a Postcolonialism 2.0 retooled as a supplement to a non-metaphorical Decolonization 2.0, that is, the struggle for restitution and repair. The term “supplement” signals both risk and promise: the risk of substituting ideas for practices; the promise of emancipation from a “mental slavery” that is hardly metaphorical, given the very real coercions of academic hiring, tenure, funding, and what Trouillot calls “micro-practices of reproduction” like the PhD dissertation.30 But this cannot be a situation of either/or, of choosing one or the other; all these projects are needed, unfolding in different registers, speeds, and scales to nurture one another: postcolonial analysis; decolonizing institutional and political practices; and, irreducible to either of those projects but at the heart of both, retooling our senses and habitus through the practices of art and life. For me, Postcolonialism 2.0 in art history starts with the very objects we attend to, where, and how. Most art historians working on modern and contemporary South Asia do so within the domain of Art with a capital “A.” As these colleagues know well, I have great respect and affection for them, their objects, their concerns, and their important scholarly and curatorial interventions. But doing art history from the postcolony can also mean going beyond—without replacing—images in galleries, exhibitions, and museums. In India, “fine art” may work in some ways to shore up social distinction à la Bourdieu, but a far more salient means of achieving and maintaining social, political, and economic mobility and status is religious patronage, including of icons in various forms: temple sculptures crafted according to centuries-old traditions; mass-produced prints bought for domestic shrines or calendars gifted to customers and associates; innovative forms using every new technology, from plastic keychain ornaments to social media gifs and concrete mega-statues. More to the point, these forms have an aesthetic force not reducible to a post-Romantic, secular understanding of the aesthetic (that is, one where the sacred is sublimated into the aesthetic) and address a different kind of sensing subject. This difference cannot be attributed to an essentialized “culture” sealed off from colonial legacies or from a globalized present. Nor is it the purview of anthropology rather than art history. Many icon artists move between vernacular religious forms and “fine” art, often coming from craft families while also being trained in colonially established art institutions and/or deploying the discourses and techniques of art. So in practice the realms of art, mass culture, and religion embodied in their works are not that distinct. This is consistent with an arena of religious patronage that does not distinguish in practice between networks of commerce, secular “culture,” religion, and sociality.31 The ongoing salience of religious imagery, which both does and doesn’t count as Art, challenges the secularizing presuppositions and disavowals of art history and of politics.32 Attending to contemporary Indian religious images illuminates how the modern West, too, has never been quite as secular as it 322

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thinks it is: a facet of image efficacy that is missed, for instance, in the distinction between art and “visual culture,” both assumed in their modern forms to be secular.33 And that isn’t the only reason why doing art history beyond Art does not mean embracing the rubric of visual culture instead. Our received history of Western modernity takes as given that vision is the primary modality of the image and the hegemonic sense (hence “visual” culture). Critiques of this hegemony and of visual technologies of power have entailed a default attention to, if not a celebration of, the corporeal and haptic as somehow necessarily resistant. But how does this hold up in a sensorium where touch, or rather untouchability, is (also) a primary modality of oppression? This is the case for the sensory regime of caste in India. Responding to Dalit-Bahujan activism and Dalit Studies scholarship, I’ve found myself investigating the sensorium of caste and its ramifications for art history.34 In my work on the recent emergence of monumental concrete icons in India (mostly Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain deities), I realized that just as significant as their massive size, if not more so, is the literal emergence of the gods out from temples into public space (see Figures 23.1 and 23.2). This, I’ve argued, is a reterritorializing upper-caste Hindu nationalist response to Dalit political assertions that used public icons to challenge a regime where “Untouchables” (now self-identifying as Dalit or oppressed) were kept out of temples.35 While that exclusion has been outlawed, the caste sensorium still pervades everyday life in India as the very ground of experience. This sensorium is organized around ritually fraught touch, purity

Figure 23.1  Matu Ram Varma, 60 ft. Mangal Mahadev Shiva, Birla Kanan, opposite New D ­ elhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport. Inaugurated 1994 (photographed 2007). ­Photograph by author.

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Figure 23.2 108 ft. Seated Shiva statue at Siddheswara Dham “pilgrimage cum cultural complex,” also known as Solophok Dham, Namchi, Sikkim. Inaugurated 2011 (photographed March 2013). Photograph by author.

and pollution, exchanges of material substances, and spatial exclusion, all of which extends to gender too, via proscriptions on touching and sharing space with menstruating or reproductive women; visual veiling is just one element of this. Here, as formulated in classical texts and borne out in present practices, unlike in the post-Cartesian schema of vision, all the senses are ultimately conceived as forms of touch. In contemporary India, this oppressive regime of touch exists alongside (not instead of) vision, as part of another “distribution of the sensible” that hinges on distance, proximity, and the occupation of space.36 This challenges not only the reduction of the image to the visual but also certain phenomenological, feminist, postcolonial, and other critiques of ocularcentrism that not only emphasize the haptic as a lens but also, in the process, end up treating it as inherently resistant. In other words, it reveals the hegemony of vision as itself a hegemonic idea, based on a European genealogy of power and knowledge. And here again, perhaps the workings of Western power are also not as predominantly visual as it thinks: attending to caste doesn’t just illuminate a “culturally” specific distribution of the sensible or social hierarchy, but also opens up conversations with work on the violent touch and exclusionary spatiotemporality of racism in settler colonialism, slavery, apartheid, and beyond.37 The point here is not to replace one analytical frame with another in binary opposition or teleological progression, but to identify the conditions in which different frames become salient. If a distribution of the sensible based on touch is efficacious for some image 324

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practices, this does not preclude the mobilization of, say, the visual force of spectacle—even in the same image, like a monumental statue. This entails an attunement to binary, arborescent logics as well as to rhizomatic and emergent processes, to the force of linear temporality as well as palimpsestic layering. Similarly, if in certain conditions decolonization requires what Gayatri Spivak has called “strategic essentialism,” it also requires strategic solidarities that recognize, analyze, and go beyond identitarian binaries (colonizer/­ colonized, elite/subaltern, settler/native) so as to draw on a historical spectrum of participating in and challenging colonial logics.38 This includes tracing how colonial logics mesh with existing or emergent hierarchies and modes of exploitation within the colonized. If one such form is caste, in its enmeshments with governmentality and identity politics, another is the dispossession of Indigenous lands within the ex-colonies: think of Brazil, Indonesia, or India (where the Bharatiya Janata Party’s corporate patron Adani’s mining operations are ­making world-destroying incursions into Indigenously inhabited forest areas, particularly in Central and Northeastern India).39 Thinking from the Global South can help to de-center—without eliding—the colonizer as an analytical focus, while still dealing with the ongoing presence and fallout of colonialism. For art history this means remaining as open as possible to all manner of images and their modalities of force and efficacy. It also means being willing to hear and see—to sense—where and how dissensus is already breaking through a given regime of the sensible, and to amplify this in our work.

INFORMAL • NORTH AMERICAN: a spy. “a CIA spook” Let me be clear: my pitch to attend to the Global South alongside Blackness and Indigeneity is not a plea for additive inclusion or recognition within existing structures and institutions. Nor is it for a moment to diminish the efforts of brilliant and committed colleagues whose engagement with colonial and other archives or creative projects is part of the work of reclaiming and nurturing minoritarian presence/presents and futures in settler colonial or diasporic spaces. It is a response to calls by Black, Indigenous, Dalit, feminist, queer, and other—including, yes, postcolonial—activists, artists, and intellectuals to fundamentally challenge these structures and to enact differently our relations with human and nonhuman others, and with the lands we inhabit. My argument is that if decolonizing art history means reckoning with and undoing the ongoing ramifications of colonialism in the present, we in the discipline need to simultaneously address this on every front, radically repopulating its personnel, archives, and canons, and radically retooling its structuring principles and epistemic foundations in tandem with its institutional practices and occupations of space. The latter call has been made for other disciplines too, most notably anthropology.40 But making art history anew or letting it burn poses its own very particular and very formidable challenges, beyond those of the silos of period and region, that have obstructed the kinds of self-reflexive conversations anthropology has been having for decades (albeit with limited success). The reasons for this conservatism are not far to seek; we know how deeply enmeshed our discipline is with a machinery of value and status that thrives on the production and recuperation of opposition and difference. It shares with other disciplines the “micro-practices of reproduction” and celebrity system that maintain academic hierarchies and power structures, but its objects are also tied to sheer wealth.41 This means, variously: the cold hard cash of the art market; works on display in museums beholden to corporations (or stashed in offshore vaults for no one to see); and urban gentrification led by studios and galleries. It also means literally overheated virtual currency and virtual art. 325

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All in their own ways are literally, materially burning up the planet and its beings even as they give our cool, cosmopolitan, beautiful discipline its spectral life. In this light it’s ironic that our “decolonial fix that values gestures of inclusion and parenthetical citation over […] reorganization” entails consecutive, ever more intense, knee-jerk frenzies of event programming, curation, hiring, admissions, funding initiatives, and publishing, as each new “-ism” and “-ation” also becomes its own brand, its own cog in the machine.42 Also paradoxically, but consistent with all forms of enterprise in the neoliberal dispensation, this machinery is also in constant crisis, constantly under threat along with the rest of the humanities and, indeed, the university itself. This sense of threat, like post–Cold War terrorism, keeps us docile and obedient, clutching at straws, jumping on every bandwagon just to keep going: digital humanities, environmental humanities, decolonizing the humanities, why not. All aboard, keep moving, nothing to see here, stay busy, keep up with the literature, keep writing and publishing, no time to stop and think! We aren’t adequately reckoning with how the increasingly massive overproduction of scholarly literature and other forms of dissemination, particularly online, is a marvelous way to keep us exhausted and anxious.43 This also makes it increasingly difficult to function outside specific, highly fragmented (though often cross-disciplinary) interest groups on the one hand and a star system on the other, even as the academy embraces collaboration and exchange. Open access is great, but only fuels the explosion. Even as scholarship is democratized, its sheer overwhelming quantum means that scholarly value is rendered increasingly algorithmic through a reliance on metadata, readership metrics, and social media. Here state- (particularly defense-) driven data sciences, as Manan Ahmed Asif argues, are part and parcel of long-standing technologies of colonial power, again articulating with corporate forces in their impacts on the academy.44 All this is what we’re up against; these are all decolonizing matters. The machine is programmed to keep itself going, there’s little scope to slow it down, let alone make it stop. Can you imagine those of us with tenure putting a moratorium on our research and publishing as we all collectively re-educate ourselves, work out what to do with our beautiful discipline, and radically redistribute the museum? Looks like we need to hunker down for the long, lonely game of micro-battles against micro-practices. It’s enormous, it’s exhausting, and its horizons constantly receding. Is it any wonder that so many of us end up as poltergeists, wandering amongst ghosts, surfacing every once in a while to make unsettled and unsettling noises only to collapse back into our interstices, fugitive spaces that aren’t really anywhere? But, as the Super Futures Haunt Qollective reminds us, “Haunting is a mattering.”45 And sometimes in the thickness of the air it feels as though the ghosts are indeed materializing. For ghosts, as for the angel of history, there’s no difference between past and present. There’s only that, and the future.

Notes 1 Oxford Languages Google English Dictionaries Online: https://www.google.com/search?q=spook, accessed March 19, 2023. By permission of Oxford University Press. In attaching the latently offensive term “spooky” to art history, my intention is not to endorse but to acknowledge this offense, spotlighting the constitutive offensiveness of the discipline of art history in everyday, nonacademic, anti-euphemistic language that encapsulates the three aspects of the discipline’s colonial hauntology described here. Thanks to Deepali Dewan and William Stafford for their thoughtful and insightful comments on the draft of this chapter; any trouble it gets me in is of my own making.

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Spooky Art History (or, Whatever Happened to the Postcolonial?) 2 Laurie Anderson, “Rocks: Spending the War Without You,” Norton Lecture 3, Mahindra ­Humanities Centre, Harvard University, April 14, 2021. This (undoubtedly conservative) estimate of COVID-19 deaths worldwide is from January 2023. 3 Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, xxi. 4 On the museological modality as a form of colonial power/knowledge see Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 1–15. However, aesthetic categories and operations undergird several of the other modalities he lists, too. 5 Zoe Todd, “The Decolonial Turn 2.0: The Reckoning.” 6 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang caution against treating “decolonization” as a noun, not a verb. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” 3. The concept of resurgence is elaborated in Leanne Simpson, As We Have Always Done. 7 Aimee Carillo Rowe and Eve Tuck outline this issue in relation to Native studies: “… while postcolonial critics have attended to settler colonialism in their theorizations of nation-state and imperial formations, the ‘post’ remains a vexed term in Native studies, where any move to place colonialism in the past risks reifying the myth of the disappearing Indian and the naturalized settler.” Aimee Carillo Rowe and Eve Tuck, “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies,” 7. The “post” in postcolonialism, which in the 1980s and ’90s echoed the equally vexed “post” in postmodernism, was the subject of much discussion and debate at the time. See for instance Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds.), Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. 8 Rowe and Tuck, “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies,” 3. I generally use the term “North America” in what follows, both because many of the structures I describe here are common to both the United States and Canada despite their political and historical differences, and because many Indigenous peoples in this region do not recognize these as sovereign nations. 9 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Adieu, Culture.” He writes, “Launched as the negation of race, culture also became the negation of class and history. Launched as a shield against some of the manifestations of racial power, culture eventually protected anthropology from all conceptual fields and apparatuses that spoke of power and inequality.” Trouillot, “Adieu, Culture,” 100. 10 Tuck and Yang invoke an “ethic of incommensurability,” where the forging of coalitions may “feel very unfriendly.” This is not the shared liberal terrain of human rights or universal affective subjects able to say “I feel your pain.” Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” 35. I use “neo/liberal” to indicate the palimpsestic layering of liberal and neoliberal institutional forms. 11 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera; Edward Said, Orientalism. Bengal’s disproportionate representation stems from the centrality of Calcutta (now Kolkata) to colonial trade, government, and education, which also made it a flourishing center for vernacular cultural production. It produced a number of influential Anglophone academics, particularly in history, political science, philosophy, literary theory, economics, and indeed art history. Note that the majority of these figures have been Brahmins, that is, at the head of the caste hierarchy. 12 My use of vernacular invokes its Latin roots in verna, meaning “slave born in the master’s house.” It therefore describes not just a linguistic form, but also a power relation that encapsulates the condition of the colonized. 13 Modernity is constitutively uneven, since it is founded on a colonialism that is disavowed in its own progress narrative. I expand on the ramifications of this in Kajri Jain, Gods in the Time of Democracy. 14 Trouillot writes, “Yet whatever doubts emerged from field practice [about the notion of cultures as isolated wholes] crashed against the corporate wall of institutionalization.” Trouillot, “Adieu, Culture,” 103. Jodi Byrd writes of “the cacophonies colonialism has left us in the transit of empire.” Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xxxix. 15 Benita Parry, “The Postcolonial: Conceptual Category or Chimera?” 12. 16 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” North American ecocriticism took its time to turn from a spiritually-tinged nationalist nostalgia for the purity of the Edenic wilderness or (in Canada) the Great White North to a concern with equality and justice in the present. In the US, Rob Nixon points out, “literary environmentalism [developed] de facto as an offshoot of American studies.” Rob Nixon, “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” 234. 17 Byrd, The Transit of Empire, 221.

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Kajri Jain 18 Byrd’s primary target is the North American “multicultural liberal settler state” as the context for the circulation of “Indianness” within “poststructural, postcolonial, critical race, and queer theories as… a process of signification and exception.” Byrd, The Transit of Empire, 221. 19 See note 7 above. 20 The putative “event” here is colonial invasion. Patrick Wolfe “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 7. The phrase appears elsewhere in his work too, but this is a commonly cited version. On the misapprehensions stemming from the uptake of this phrase, see J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “ ‘A structure, not an event’: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral 5.1 (2016): https://doi.org/10.25158/L5.1.7. Here Kauanui argues for a distinct theorization of Indigeneity rather than collapsing it into settler colonialism: “Settler Colonial Studies does not, should not, and cannot replace Indigenous Studies.” 21 Instances of such entanglements abound. One instance, whose relevance will become clear as my argument progresses, is the constellation between colonial philological projects that applied similar techniques to generate data about Native populations and colonized peoples elsewhere (sometimes conducted by the same personnel) and the geopolitical imperatives driving the increasingly algorithmic military uses of big data in area studies. See Manan Asif Ahmed, “Technologies of Power.” 22 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 11. 23 The current website of my own graduate department (https://arthistory.utoronto.ca/faculty) was instructive in this regard: under “Fields of Study” those working primarily on the West were listed by period, with no regional specification, whereas those of us working on the non-West were also listed by place. This instituted the West as the universal default while its others were consigned to anthropological specificity. (We are working to address this; watch that space!) Another recent example: faculty hiring for 2021–2022 in a highly regarded North American department of art history started with a search in the already-represented area of Ancient Greek art, while also considering another in Black OR Latinx diasporas. The value of the master heritage remains intact while diasporic minorities must compete; the Global South was not even on the table (South America, for instance, is unrepresented in its own right in that department, nor is pre-modern Africa). A third example: the Getty Research Institute tacked “African American Art History” on to its theme for 2021–2022; the next year’s theme was “Art and Migration.” Why not a year dedicated to “Decolonizing Art History” that brings these and other—including, notably, ­Indigenous—­constituencies together? 24 David Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession.” This convergence of strategies is widespread; advertising in particular has been a major contributor to racial and gender stereotyping. However, this has taken on its own specific character in North America’s plural but White-dominant settler context. On the neoliberal commodification of culture and its institutionalization within legal frameworks, see Rosemary Coombe, “Legal Claims to Culture in and Against the Market.” 25 Kobena Mercer’s essay “Black Art and the Burden of Representation” was first published in Third Text in 1990; compare this with Aram Han Sifuentes, “How Internalized White Supremacy Manifests for My BIPOC Students in Art School” written 30 years later, in 2021. Very different language and terms of analysis, same old issues; each generation and constituency, it would seem, must encounter this institutional suffocation for itself. 26 Manan Ahmed Asif’s “Technologies of Power” outlines how security concerns have shaped specialist knowledge in area studies. But this knowledge, including the very constitution of “areas,” remains specialized, largely confined to area studies scholars, journalists, and State Department and military “spooks.” For instance, South Asianists, myself included, are routinely referred to as scholars of Southeast Asian art (can’t get away from that mysterious East!) even by museum personnel and departmental colleagues; several students who signed up for my class on modern and contemporary South Asian art thought they’d be learning about China (I have since changed the title from “South Asian” to the more widely recognized, though still potentially confusing for older colonial reasons, “Indian”). Further, the racial essentialization attendant on “culture” means that I am also frequently assumed to be a scholar of the South Asian diaspora, as if diaspora and homeland were one and the same rather than closely interconnected. 27 On this proprietary logic and how it is challenged by Native claims see Rosemary Coombe, “The Properties of Culture and the Politics of Possessing Identity.”

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Spooky Art History (or, Whatever Happened to the Postcolonial?) 28 If contemporary art and cinema provide an idiom readily accessible to North American students in art history and visual studies, in literature this familiar language has literally been English. Postcolonial literature has been dominated by “global” writing in English; the postcolonialists’ literary poster boy Salman Rushdie was able to infamously claim that Indian prose in English “is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced” after independence in its vernaculars. So even as dead white males were being replaced in the literary canon, university programs in non-Western languages remained in area studies ghettos. Salman Rushdie, “Introduction,” Mirrorwork, viii. 29 Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient.” 30 Trouillot, “Adieu, Culture,” 101. Here, again, we must also include the kind of training required to read a lot of postcolonialist scholarship. The phrase “mental slavery” is from Bob Marley’s 1980 “Redemption Song” (“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery/None but ourselves can free our minds”). This in turn cites a speech by Marcus Garvey at Menelik Hall, Nova Scotia, in October 1937. Marcus Garvey, The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. VII, 791. 31 I describe this vernacular capitalist arena, which colonial authorities called the “bazaar,” in Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar. 32 For an extended discussion see Kajri Jain, “In Which Contemporary Indian Iconopraxis Devours Some Sacred Cows of Art History.” 33 On these presuppositions of secularity see David Morgan, “Visual Culture and Religion” and “Art and Religion in the Modern Age.” 34 Dalit Studies is a burgeoning field; among those who have worked most directly on questions of the senses and experience are Gopal Guru (including in collaboration with Sundar Sarukkai) and Aniket Jaaware. See for instance Guru and Sarukkai, Caste and the Everyday Social. 35 Jain, Gods in the Time of Democracy. 36 On politics as the distribution and redistribution of the sensible see Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics. 37 I am thinking here of the way place, space, and bodies are so central to the work of Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick, Eve Tuck, Leanne Simpson, and Zoe Todd, among others. 38 Gayatri Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” 13. Spivak reads the Subaltern Studies “project to retrieve the subaltern consciousness” as the production of a “subjecteffect” through “a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (emphasis in the original). 39 For just one instance of the literally fatal nexus between the Indian state and untouchabil ity see Radhika Bordia and Yogesh Pawar,  “The Modern Form of Untouchability Practised by Indian Govts,” Article14, 14 April, 2021: https://article-14.com/post/the-modern-form-ofuntouchability-practised-by-indian-govts. On the internal colonialism of Adani and the BJP, see Stephanie Findlay and Hudson Lockett, “‘Modi’s Rockefeller’: Gautam Adani and the concentration of power in India,” Financial Times, November 12, 2020: https://www.ft.com/ content/474706d6–1243–4f1e-b365–891d4c5d528b. 40 See, for instance, Zoe Todd, “The Decolonial Turn 2.0,” which ends: “... we are tasked with making anthropology what it needs to be. Or, maybe, abandoning it all together. And starting something else anew.” The title of an influential piece by Ryan Jobson, “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn,” speaks for itself. 41 As an instance of such “micro-practices of reproduction” Trouillot describes how the ethnographic monograph, a rite of passage for anthropology, reproduces “culture” as a closed category through the bounded “ethnographic trilogy” of “one observer, one time, one place.” Trouillot, “Adieu, Culture,” 101, 104. Similarly, art history’s investment in cultures (a category that slides into civilizations and identities), but also in a specific form of auratic authorial value, is reproduced through the discipline’s practices of expertise in objects/makers, periods, and geographical contexts. 42 Jobson, “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn,” 267. 43 These two articles have self-explanatory titles: Arif Jinha, “50 Million: An Estimate of the Number of Scholarly Articles in Existence” (in 2010); Philip G. Altbach, and Hans de Wit, “Too Much Academic Research is Being Published” (in 2018). In 2018 Altback and de Wit suggested that there were about 30,000 academic journals, with nearly two million articles published a year.

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Kajri Jain 44 The “algorithmic modality” that Asif posits as shared between colonial philology and data s­ ciences is methodologically concerned with “data, metadata, retrieval and display.” US area studies programs, he argues, are part of “an organic whole” with DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a defense initiative whose significant presence in universities has grown through computer science and data science research collaborations, with area studies and DARPA “funding streams criss-crossing private and governmental sources into departments.” Asif, “Technologies of Power,” 7–8. 45 Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective (SFHQ), “Before Dispossession, or Surviving It,” 3.

Selected Bibliography Asif, Manan Ahmed. “Technologies of Power—From Area Studies to Data Sciences,” Spheres: Journal of Digital Cultures, #5 Spectres of AI, November 20, 2019. https://spheres-journal.org/ contribution/technologies-of-power-from-area-studies-to-data-sciences/ Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Coombe, Rosemary. “Legal Claims to Culture in and Against the Market: Neoliberalism and the Global Proliferation of Meaningful Difference,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 1 (2005): 35–52. Guru, Gopal and Sundar Sarukkai. Experience, Caste, and the Everyday Social. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019. Jain, Kajri. Gods in the Time of Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Jain, Kajri. “In Which Contemporary Indian Iconopraxis Devours Some Sacred Cows of Art History,” in How Secular Is Art? On The Art of Art History in South Asia, ed. Tapati Guha Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, 91–122. Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani. ““A structure, not an event”: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral 5.1 (2016). https://doi.org/10.25158/L5.1.7. Linda, Nochlin. “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society, New York: Harper and Row, 1989, 33–59. Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Rowe, Aimee Carrillo and Eve Tuck. “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies: Ongoing Settlement, Cultural Production, and Resistance,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17, no. 1 (­February 2017): 3–13. Todd, Zoe. “The Decolonial Turn 2.0: The Reckoning,” Anthrodendum, June 15, 2018. https://anthrodendum.org/2018/06/15/the-decolonial-turn-2-0-the-reckoning/. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “Adieu, Culture: A New Duty Arises,” in Global Transformations, Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2003, 97–116.

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24 SPATIAL ABSTRACTION AS A COLONIZING TOOL Fernando Luiz Lara

Spatial Abstraction as a Colonizing Tool It is quite difficult to conceptualize art, either in broader or specific terms, without abstraction. Abstraction is so rooted in our history of manipulating objects that it predates our species. Our ancestral homo erectus probably deserves the credit for separating the idea of fire from the accidental bush burns, sparking (pun intended) the technological revolution. More recently, Jean Piaget taught us that abstraction develops in the very processes of learning in early childhood.1 Before most of us can walk, we develop the ability to separate concepts in our minds from phenomena experienced in the world. Abstraction is also about reduction, selecting a few ideas out of the messy experience of the world in order to operate more efficiently. In 1937, Meyer Shapiro defined abstract art as “the unhistorical universalizing of the qualities of art,” which implies removing some, but not all context.2 Shapiro explained that by Renouncing or drastically distorting natural shapes the abstract painter makes a judgment of the external world. He says that such and such aspects of experience are alien to art and to the higher realities of form; he disqualifies them from art.3 The key, then, is not the elimination of all context and external references but the elimination of some and the naturalization of others. Building on Shapiro’s text from 85 years ago and decolonial scholarship of the last three decades, I propose that abstraction—and more specifically spatial abstraction—is a root cause of social inequality, racism, resource depletion, and climate change.4 It is important to mention that I am coming from the discipline of architectural theory, and as much as there is substantial overlap between art and architecture, the divergences are significant and merit acknowledgement. The process of modernization unleashed by the events of 1492 (Spanish Reconquista and Columbus’s first trip across the Atlantic) relied on higher and higher degrees of spatial abstraction. Recent works by Patricia Seed, Doreen Massey, and Ricardo Padrón demonstrate that cartographic spatial abstraction was developed after 1492, not before.5 Padrón explained that Columbus used itineraries—or detailed travel 331

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logs in which the navigator is immersed in such a register, not separate from it—to guide him around the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, Yucatan, and the northern shores of South America. About a century later, new mapping technologies had been created, separating the European invaders from everything and everybody being represented on early maps.6 What we call abstraction, soon to be synthesized by René Descartes as cogito, ergo sum (I think therefore I am), is a process of creating difference between the ones who represent (at that time inevitably European white males) and the many who are represented (those who are not male, not white, and not Homo Sapiens).7 Indeed, we must ask if such differences between the ones who represent and the ones who are represented have not been a core component of the definition of art from time immemorial. We do not know the biographies of the people who painted the limestone walls of Chiribiquete, Colombia, 12,000 years ago, but we know that they were differentiating themselves from the animals and objects there represented (Figure 24.1). Is representation in itself an index of domination and control? Or is domination and control by representation something inherent to the lenses by which we see the world? David Graeber and David Wengrow have recently pointed out the historiographical lenses that tend to ignore egalitarian societies and speak only about the imperial militaristic ones.8 Their book The Dawn of Everything calls our attention to the fact that ancient urbanism is relational, not abstract. All stratified and hierarchical societies, such as the Toltec,

Figure 24.1  Chiribiquete, Colombia, circa tenth century BC. Photo by Carlos Castaño, wiki ­commons file Chiribiquete_AJ11calabazos.JPG.

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the Maya, or the Chimu used architecture to convey power representations. More egalitarian Indigenous societies “governed themselves for centuries without any signs of temples and palaces that would only emerge later, (while in some societies) it never emerged at all.”9 Graeber and Wengrow claim that we have devoted way too much attention to militaristic societies and not enough to egalitarian ones, creating the impression that human history only evolves by brute force. We desperately need to study and cultivate alternative modes of engaging with nature and with ourselves. What is by now clear is that after five centuries of abstraction reigning supreme, any solution to our double crisis of climate change and social inequality involves rescuing and fostering relational knowledges that were abandoned as a consequence of what I call an overdose of abstraction. Every time we use spatial abstraction, we miss something, and we will not be able to survive our planetary twin emergency by doubling down on abstraction, or technology for all that matters. In fact, we probably need to abstract less and empathize more. The twentieth century gave us three powerful critiques of abstraction and some possible antidotes. In the early years of the century, German art historian Wilhem Worringer defined abstraction as the opposite of empathy, in the context of the rise of avant-garde art.10 For Worringer, either you use the superior processes of abstraction, or you empathize. Echoing René Descartes’s writings of three centuries before, Worringer argued that emotions and care do not belong in proper knowledge realms. In the second half of the twentieth century, Henri Lefebvre questioned our over-reliance on abstract space by discussing the hidden layers of lived space and representational space.11 But perhaps the scholar who really revealed the perverse side of abstraction was Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), Freire explain how the success of his literacy process was based on substituting concrete examples of daily life for urban words that Brazilian peasants were not familiar with.12 Relational knowledge, whether conceptualized as concrete examples, lived spaces, or empathy, constitutes a powerful way to advance our relationship with each other and with other Earthly beings. I come back to the wall paintings of Chiribiquete read through Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s concept of “Amerindian Perspectivism” to propose that they were both abstract and relational at the same time. Viveiros de Castro argues that Indigenous people of the Amazon understand themselves as humans, like we all do, but also see degrees of humanity in every other living creature, unlike in the so-called West.13 “Amerindian Perspectivism” proposes a completely different relationship between nature and culture and resolves the contradiction between animism and ethnocentrism, being orthogonal to both. It is roughly explained when we understand what happens when a Yanomami that gets a pebble from the river, cleans, polishes, and hangs it on her neck, making the pebble more human and as a consequence also gaining a degree of “pebbleness.” The strong relational component visible in any interaction between living beings caused Viveiros de Castro to oppose traditional binaries, such as “nature and culture.” This “reshuffling of our conceptual schemes [led him] to suggest the expression, ‘multi- naturalism’, to designate one of the contrastive features of Amerindian thought in relation to Western ‘multiculturalist’ cosmologies.”14 Through the lenses provided by Viveiros de Castro’s Perspectivism, I suggest that we consider that when painting a deer by pressing pigment into stone for days in a row, the painter became a bit more “stony” in the material side but also “deery” in the formal side. The abstract forms developed here are very different from points on a map or numbers in a spreadsheet because they involve countless hours of pigment preparation and imprinting on the wall. The form is abstract, but the implementation is absolutely relational. 333

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Modernity and Spatial Abstraction At this point I should acknowledge that my training in art history, and especially in art theory, is insufficient at best. As I wrote earlier, I come from the side of architectural history and theory, and my analysis is based on a specific kind of abstraction: spatial abstraction, specifically, the manipulation of concrete space by simplifying its representation. In the design disciplines spatial representation still reigns supreme, and there is a good reason why. The rise of spatial abstraction is shared with the rise of architecture as a discipline and any suggestion of calibrating abstract and non-abstract concepts is perceived as a threat. The  core of architectural theory has been obsessed with abstract form for a few centuries, and any other way of generating space—be it phenomenological, participatory, or ­informal—has been brushed aside as insufficiently architectural.15 Abstraction, as the definition goes, is the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events, or something that exists only as ideas. The key question here is which facts have been elevated to the realm of ideas and which facts have been discarded. Modernity was created when we abandoned any relational knowledge and adopted a superficial (i.e., pertaining to surface) understanding of space in which the controlling white man is removed, and every non-man, non-white beings are reduced to objects to be plotted and, therefore, controlled. Spatial abstraction has been a tool of colonialism and an instrument of inequality since the world-system took shape in the sixteenth century, and architecture is deeply embedded in this process. Architecture schools use abstraction to separate their design students from everything they knew before and immerse them with a new set of values, architectural values. The first thing most beginning architecture students hear is, forget what you thought was architecture before, we will teach you the proper definition, and it has nothing to do with the spaces you lived. Once delinked from any previous spatial relations, conventional studio pedagogy teaches them to master abstraction, almost always discarding any site context or content in order to manipulate only geometry. For the non-architect readers, I need to explain that a plan or a section are an abstract cut through a future structure, with some information—windows, doors, HVAC, plumbing—registered and others, such as history, emotions, affections, traumas, not registered. Site plans do not indicate community life. Contours do not tell the history of the land. Plans and sections are arbitrary narratives that force behaviors on people. That is the Janus-faced power of architecture: it could be used to envision a better world, but most of the time it is used to reinforce the status-quo. If we want to mitigate the erasures embedded in spatial inequality to keep moving towards more inclusive design processes, we need to understand the history of the relationship between design and exclusion. The historical roots of spatial abstraction are intertwined with the historical roots of architectural design, and the Americas played a central role in that development.

Edmundo O’Gorman and the Invention of the Americas In 1958, the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman published his groundbreaking study The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History, which uses cartography to demonstrate that it was the encounter with the Americas that triggered a revolution in European thought and not the other way around.16 The bulk of O’Gorman’s argument is that America was invented as an otherness that allowed Europe to place itself as a center. The world for Europeans in the fifteenth 334

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century was formed by three land masses—Europe, Africa, Asia—surrounded by the Mare Oceanum. Analyzing the medieval idea of orbis terrarum (earth island) in opposition to orbis alterius (other possible islands inhabited by unknown creatures). In the words of O’Gorman, From the moment that the orbis terrarium was conceived as embracing the whole globe, both land and sea, and no longer circumscribed only to the Island of the Earth, man opened for himself the road to the conquer of the universe. The universe no longer appears to him as a strange, alien, and forbidden reality belonging to God and made for His sake, but a vast inexhaustible quarry of cosmic matter out of which man may carve out his world, depending not on divine permission, but solely on his own initiative, daring, and technical ability.17 O’Gorman explains that the invention of America tears down the medieval notion of the orbis terrarium, the inhabitable world, as an insular entity closely bounded by a menacing ocean, and replaces it with an image of the world as a fully masterable terraqueous globe. Here I need to highlight the concept of masterable for its direct link to technology. As synthesized by Descartes in the separation between res cogitans (mind) from res extensa (everything else), the minds of European men were now ‘masters’ of everything else that is not only land and resources but also all women and all non-European men. The connection with modern technology could not be more explicit. The remaking of the world according to its own technical ability as proposed by O’Gorman was triggered by the encounter with the Americas and implemented simultaneously at both sides of the Atlantic. However, chronological parallelism does not mean symmetry. It was in the Americas that the project of modernity encompassed the scale of a whole continent, from the first Spanish cities of the last decade of the fifteenth century to the Jeffersonian grid of the early nineteenth century and the Argentine 1876 law of Avellaneda, providing lands to settlers for free or nominal costs.18 Here space, both real and abstract, acquired a central position in the transformation that we call modernity. Or in the words of Mahmood Mamdani, colonialism triumphed in the Americas.19

Spatial Abstraction as Colonizing Tool The architectural scholarship defines the late fifteenth century as the time in which abstraction took over the building practice, defining architecture as a separate discipline altogether. As Dalia Judovitz wrote, “the scenographic depiction of rationalized space became the impetus for a combined approach to mathematics and philosophy, as figurative science of measure, order, and proportion.”20 In practical terms, the design techniques of the early Renaissance were optimized to a higher degree of efficiency, giving us the plans, sections, and elevations that we used until a few decades ago (before the rise of BIM and the fully 3-dimensional software capabilities).21 For most architectural scholars, it was Brunelleschi who achieved this in the fifteenth-century Florence, soon to be systematized by Alberti a few decades later. That simplified narrative is once again a Eurocentric construction. Back in the 1970s, Samuel Edgerton showed that Brunelleschi did not invent linear perspective. More accurate would be the understanding that Brunelleschi revisited Ptolemy and “rediscovered” the technique.22 In addition, as discussed by all the latest surveys of architecture, the technology of the two-layered dome was used in Islamic mosques 335

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centuries before Brunelleschi.23 The answer to why the Florentine’s perspective became so important for Western civilization was discussed by Edgerton almost 50 years ago: it was developed in parallel to cartographic techniques that allowed Europeans to both cross open oceans and to control territories very far from their homelands. At the heart of those innovations is a new concept of space that is less about Brunelleschi and Alberti and more about the conquistadors. Alberti, as explained by Mark Jarzombek, was deeply rooted in medieval thought. The work that is valued as so important “could perhaps be considered a neo-medieval critique of mainstream humanism.”24 The real change in the concept of space came when Spanish and Portuguese traversed the Atlantic Ocean and occupied the territories beyond. Patricia Seed explained that the Portuguese used points located by observing the skies as both a mapping device and an argument for possession.25 Ricardo Padrón argued that the new conception of abstract space “rationalized the known world according to the principles of Euclidean geometry.”26 This process of abstraction allowed the European powers to make the world apprehensible in ways that it had never been before. Students of architecture know that the process of design abstraction was developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is no coincidence that the European occupation of the Americas happened at exactly the same time.27 It is a disciplinary consensus that abstraction is the main component of the modern process of architectural design. The very process of slicing an object into plan, section, and elevation is a process of reduction as I explained earlier. We discard information in order to be able to manipulate what we consider the essence. But what if the treasure lies in the information discarded? We would never know that we threw the baby out with bath water if we never accepted that there was a baby there. The point here, learned from contemporary scholars that engage Indigenous knowledge in an effort towards epistemic decolonization is that the rise of abstraction in the sixteenth century killed relational processes that we urgently need to bring back to the table. Architectural scholarship has scores of books and articles about spatial abstraction, almost all enthusiastically defending it as a core component of design. Five hundred years after the fall of Tenochtitlan and almost 400 years after the Cartesian synthesis of cogito, ergo sum, we still teach about the rise of abstraction as cause, not consequence, of the European victorious occupation of the Americas. No wonder that architectural scholarship has not yet dealt properly with the impact of such encounter. The large majority of our scholarship until very recently completely ignored the Atlantic encounter or minimized its role in European developments.28 The spatial abstraction that is so keen for every architect after the Renaissance is manifest in the very process of descriptive geometry that we associate with Gaspar Monge in the eighteenth century but which in reality can be traced back to Albrecht Dürer’s Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt (Course in the Art of Measurement with Compass and Ruler) from 1525. What Cortés was doing in Tenochtitlan—razing the city, destroying its relational layers to build it anew for Spanish control—was simultaneously being codified by Dürer in Nuremberg. This is no coincidence and decolonial theory has stressed over and over that everything we call modernity was deeply dependent on the European occupation of the Americas.29 In The Battle of the Gods and the Giants, Thomas Lennon explains that the main philosophical problems faced by Descartes was the problem of the void, the space between things. If space is independent from God, then God is not the author of all things. It is not that difficult to see how the theological problem of defining space is a direct consequence 336

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of the European occupation of the Americas during the previous century. Lennon presents two provisional solutions, one that he calls the apotheosis of space, present in the work of Marin Cureau (1594–1669), in which spatiality is a feature of God, not something different from it. The other provisional solution as presented by François Bernier (1625–1688) implies the minimization or the altogether elimination of the ontological status of space, what Lennon calls the annihilation of space.30 Descartes’s solution to this problem, which was so successful that it became a pillar of Western philosophy, was to separate space (res extensa) from the mind (res cogitans). The Cartesian solution implies that God is everywhere, but his consciousness is in the res cogitans. It liberates space from God although He still has power over everything. It also, in practical terms, liberates white European man to act upon space because God has been dislocated to the mind. In that movement Descartes also elevates some kind of knowledge over other. Everything that can be reduced to mathematical formulas acquires the status of truth. Measurements at large are the main category, but this also includes religious ideas and matters of faith, as long as it is Christian. It excludes from the higher realm of res cogitans any emotion, feeling or passion, locating them in nature. This philosophical move is the basis for Francis Bacon (1561–1626) to declare a few decades later that women, non-white men, and nature belonged to the res extensa and their arguments were in the realm of feelings, emotions and passions, not superior reason of white European men. What we call empiricism or scientific method (which admittedly gave us amazing victories such as vaccines, clean water, long distance communication) is a direct consequence of the European invasion of the Americas and the epistemological effort of dismissing all knowledge that does not fit the white-Christian-European-male place at the top of the food chain. Moving the issue of abstraction from instrumental maps to epistemology, Walsh and Mignolo explain that: the course of action leading to the historical foundations of the modern/colonial project in the 16th century was not merely a question of physical actions (occupying lands, exploiting labor, etc.). It was above all a massive conceptual (epistemical) machine building and managing knowledge that the European institutions believed were superior and truer than others.31 Padrón tells us that the new conception of abstract space ordered geometrically Spoke of a new order of things, one in which mathematical abstraction promised to make the world apprehensible in ways that it had never been before. This novel, intellectual apprehensibility, in turn, supported an emerging culture of commercial, military, and political expansion.32 It supported modernity. Or as noted by Arturo Escobar, it supported both modernity and coloniality, two faces of the same coin. Escobar writes about Western philosophy enshrining Space as the absolute, unlimited and universal, while banning place to the realm of the particular, the limited, the local. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers, from Descartes to Leibniz, assumed that places are only momentary subdivisions of a universal and homogeneous space. For this to happen, space had to be dissociated from the bodies that occupy it.33 337

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Such separation of mind and body that was synthesized by Descartes was fundamental to the development of architectural drawing in general and perspective in particular. Not only was the mind/body divide influenced by the invention of the Americas, the very act of ­occupying and controlling that much space was an architectural problem. Back in architectural theory, Anthony Vidler is one among many to stress that the: Fundamental problems in vision and spatiality were forged in the early modernist period itself. The upsetting of the Albertian/Cartesian/Kantian paradigms of space and representational techniques by psychoanalysis and psychology, placing the onus of sight not on the technique but on the observer, was the first step in the formation of the relatively differentiated subject, immersed in the apparent chaos of a space-time atomic universe, a universe now represented by the distortions of cubism, futurism, expressionism, and the like. The Renaissance discovery of perspective, however, and the subsequent theoretical and experiential permutations that have apparently placed the viewer/subject in what many historians have argued is a continual erosion, if not explosion, of the humanist viewpoint, has not been entirely obviated or denied by psycho-physiological warping, literal or phenomenal.34 There is no question that Architecture as we know it was born from the Albertian/Cartesian/Kantian paradigms of space and representation techniques. What neither Vidler nor any other architectural theorist has explored so far is the role of the European occupation of the Americas as a major trigger of such transformations. For it was in the Americas that abstraction was being effectively used to control the territory. Lines were imposed upon sites that had very different histories and as a result the colonial/modern project broke previous territorial organization and imposed a new order by symbolism. From recent scholarship stitching Descartes, Leibnitz, and Newton, we learn that the rise of abstraction is an index of the modernity/coloniality project, which prompts the question of how the Americas participated in the development of abstract space?35 Of course, there were alternative understandings of space in the seventeenth century, such as Pierre Gassendi’s idea to “reject spatial dimensions as primitive and instead to derive them from corporeal dimensions.”36 My argument is that architectural theories were not only a consequence of Descartes’s synthesis of cogito, ergo sum but indeed an instrument of its hegemony. Colin Chamberlain reminds us that in several passages Descartes holds that the self may be considered as a disembodied being without “hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses.”37 Denise Ferreira da Silva wrote that: Descartes needs to articulate extended things (the human body and the sensible objects of knowledge) to write their ontoepistemological irrelevance lest man, the subject of knowledge, also become a thing whose existence and essence is determined from without, that is an affectable thing.38 The idea of disembodiment is the key here. What the abstract understanding of space does to reality is precisely to remove the mind from it, placing European men above it as res cogitans and everything else below as res extensa. Architecture have played a central role in this construction, and we have only just started to properly study it through the lens of modernity/coloniality. 338

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The history of spatial abstraction is telling us that we lost something important when we developed spatial abstraction, and that we should find ways to bring back empathy, emotion and embodied knowledges to the design table. To close this chapter, I would propose that we think of spatial abstraction like any pharmakos: in the right dosage it can cure, in the wrong dosage it kills. For centuries spatial abstraction has been used to control and colonize. To decolonize design abstraction is to tame its exclusionary powers by infusing it with relational knowledges and participatory processes, in search of a better balance.

Notes 1 Jean Piaget, Studies in Reflecting Abstraction (Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press, 2001). 2 Meyer Shapiro, “Nature of Abstract Art,” Marxist Quarterly 1 (January–March, 1937): 83. 3 Ibid., 87. 4 I am referring here to the works of Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, among others. 5 See Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Doreen Massey, For Space (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2005); and Ricardo Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 6 See Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, op. cit. 7 I have developed those ideas further in Fernando Lara, “Abstraction is a Privilege,” Platform Space, accessed June 9, 2021, https://www.platformspace.net/home/abstraction-is-a-privilege and Fernando Lara, “American Mirror: The Occupation of the “New World” and the Rise of Architecture as We Know It,” The Plan Journal, 5, no.1 (2020): 71–88. 8 David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). 9 Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everythin, 277. 10 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1997). The original German text dates from 1907. 11 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). The first edition in French is from 1974. 12 See Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York and London: Continuum, 2005). While Lefebvre’s The Production of Space adds to 47,000 citations in Google Scholar, Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed reaches 92,000 in English only and almost half a million when all translations are tallied. 13 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4, no. 3, (1998): 469–488. 14 Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis,” 470. 15 On these approaches, see Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Linda N. Groat, “Carbuncles, Columns, and Pyramids: Lay and Expert Evaluations of Contextual Design Strategies,” in Brenda Case Scheer and Wolfgang F. E. Preiser, eds., Design Review: Challenging Urban Aesthetic Control (Boston, MA: Springer, 1994): 156–164; and Antonino Di Raimo, “What Does Informality Have to Say to Architecture? Decolonising the Enquiry and the Enquirer,” in A. Di Raimo, S. Lehmann, and A. Melis, eds., Informality through Sustainability: Urban Informality Now (London and New York: Routledge, 2020). 16 Edmundo O’Gorman, La Invención de América: Investigación Acerca de la Estructura Histórica del Nuevo Mundo y del Sentido de su Devenir (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1958). Published in English as The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961). 17 O’Gorman, OpCit: The Invention of America, 129.

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Fernando Luiz Lara 18 See Ana Maria León, “Plains and Pampa: Decolonizing ‘America,’” Harvard Design Magazine 48 (Spring/Summer 2021), http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/48/plains-and-pampadecolonizing-america. Accessed August 13, 2022. 19 Mahmood Mamdani, “Settler Colonialism: Then and Now,” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 3 (2015): 596. 20 Dalia Judovitz, “Vision, Representation, and Technology in Descartes,” in D. Levin, ed.,­ Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Oakland and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). 21 BIM, or Building Information Modeling, is the name given to the software integration of geometry and data, in which each piece of a building 3D model is linked to a spreadsheet that calculates its weight, cost, embedded energy, etc. 22 Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975). 23 Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Architecture since 1400 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Frances D. K. Ching, Mark Jarzombek, and Vikramaditya Prakash, eds., A Global History of Architecture, 3rd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2017). 24 Mark Jarzombek, On Leon Baptista Alberti: His Literary and Aesthetic Theories (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), 59. 25 Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 111. 26 Padrón, The Spacious Word, 32. 27 Lara, “American Mirror” op. cit.; Fernando Lara, “El Otro del Otro: Cómo las Historias Canónicas de la Arquitectura Borraron las Américas,” Anales del Instituto de Arte Americano, 51, no.1 (2021): 1–14. 28 New publications dealing with the impact of the American occupation on Renaissance Europe include James-Chakraborty, Architecture Since 1400, op. cit.; Clare Cardinal-Pett, A History of Architecture and Urbanism in the Americas (New York and London: Routledge, 2015); Fernando Luiz Lara, “Urbis Americana: Thoughts on our Shared (and Exclusionary) Traditions,” preface to B. Freire-Medeiros and J. O’Donnell, eds., Urban Latin America: Images, Words, Flows and the Built Environment (New York: Routledge, 2018); and Lara, “American Mirrors”, op. cit. 29 See Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber (New York: Continuum, 1995); Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011); Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton University Press, 1995). 30 Thomas M. Lennon, The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655–1715 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 119. 31 Walter D. Mignolo, and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (­Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2018), 172. 32 Padrón, The Spacious Word, 32. 33 Arturo Escobar, ““Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization” Political Geography, 20 (2001): 143. 34 Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000). 35 See Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, eds. Globalization and the Decolonial Option (­London and New York: Routledge, 2013); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stamfrod: Stanford University Press, 2006); Ramón Grosfoguel, “The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/ Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, XI, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 73–79. 36 Thomas Lennon, OpCit: The Battle of the Gods and Giants, 118. 37 Colin Chamberlain, “What Am I? Descartes’s Various Ways of Considering the Self,” Journal of Modern Philosophy 2, no. 1 (2020): 1–30. 38 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 44.

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Selected Bibliography Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York and London: Continuum, 2005. Lara, Fernando. “American Mirror: The Occupation of the “New World” and the Rise of Architecture as We Know It.” The Plan Journal 5, no.1 (2020): 71–88. Lara, Fernando and Felipe Hernandez. Spatial Concepts for Decolonizing the Spatial History of the Americas. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Publishers, 2022. Massey, Doreen. For Space. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2005. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Padrón, Ricardo. The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Viveiros De Castro, Eduardo. “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1998): 469–488.

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25 DISHUMANIZING ART HISTORY? Carolyn Dean

“Dishumanization” is not widely used and its meaning is not readily apparent.1 It is, ­therefore, mostly unencumbered by semantic baggage. I intend the “dis-” to do similar work to that performed in the word “disinterest” wherein it commonly signals a position between “biased in favor” and “biased against.” In other words, the “dis-” in dishumanization rejects anthropocentrism’s vice-like grip on the Euro-Western intellectual tradition.2 A more apt term might be “dehumanize” if only the “de-” were allowed to operate as it does in “dehumidify” in which it signals the reduction of moisture from the air, but not its elimination.3 Dehumidification is not degrading to either humidity in all contexts or to the resultant dry air. “Dehumanization,” however, is generally understood as the denial of human qualities; significantly, its impact rests on the implicit assertion that human qualities are an absolute positive. Even a cursory review of human history contradicts any such notion. The comedian Stephen Colbert, host of CBS’ The Late Show, occasionally features a segment called “The Colbert Questionert” in which celebrity guests are asked a series of questions to which they provide off-the-cuff answers. Responses to the question “What is the scariest animal?” have ranged from black widow spider (Meryl Streep) to hippopotamus (George Clooney). Thus far, nobody has given the unequivocally correct answer: human beings. Humans have proved to be more deadly than any other animal by far, and have relentlessly failed to be “humane.” Yet, we incessantly lie to ourselves about the virtues (mis)applied to being human. In so doing, we practice human exceptionalism, destabilizing the foundations not just of art history but of the humanities and social sciences more generally. The assertion of human exceptionalism—including the fact that some humans among all animals can use the term “animal” to demean other “humans”—has produced some of the most vile episodes in history in which the Euro-West’s notion of “human” has been wielded to exclude, rather than include.4 The perverse discourses questioning the humanity of Indigenous Americans, people of African ancestry, and Jews are best known today, but these are not aberrant occurrences; they are all too common and have been repeated in innumerable interactions over centuries. The notion of dishumanizing art history rests on the fact that the concept “human” and the particular kind of anthropocentrism it undergirds is not global and does not readily cross linguistic boundaries. Many extra-Western peoples have not and do not recognize DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-30 342

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human beings as a useful semantic category; hence, “human” is understood in traditional art historical discourse to produce an exceptionally narrow view that has been both naturalized and universalized. For most art historians, human beings are not only the creators of what is studied but also the only viewers who matter. Customarily sidelined or overlooked are other entities who see, feel, and think about visual culture. Dishumanization, as a concept, makes room for all manner of sentient entities, in particular a vast range of subjectobjects; “subject-objects” identify material things that occupy subject positions but that are treated as “mere” objects in and through Euro-Western art collection, exhibition, and discursive practices.5 Dishumanization not only recognizes the existence of subject-objects but insists on the inclusion of human beings as subject-objects alongside other subject-objects. This is not a demotion of humanity, but rather the elevation of sentient entities that have all too often been silenced. The dishumanization of art history still involves the study of human beings and also the relationships between humans and other-than-humans, but it rejects a priori human exceptionalism and welcomes the recognition of other sentient entities. This discussion will focus on the visual cultures of the Autonomous-era Americas, with a particular interest in that of the Inkas (Incas) of Andean South America.6 The implications, however, should be applicable beyond the Inkas and give rise to other ways of approaching, broadening, and decolonizing studies of visual culture.

Inka Worlds Like the term “art,” “human being” is neither natural nor neutral.7 As philosopher Rosi Braidotti argues, “human” is “a selective and exclusionary category that polices access to rights and entitlements”; she dates anthropocentrism to Europe’s Enlightenment period and identifies it as culturally specific.8 While a particular type of anthropocentrism is implicated in many of art history’s practices, it is perhaps most readily wielded in the concept of “anthropomorphism.” Nearly a decade ago, I contributed to “Notes from the Field,” a feature of The Art Bulletin under Karen Lang, editor-in-chief from 2011 to 2013.9 For the March 2012 issue, authors were asked to address the concept of anthropomorphism. Initially I thought I might explore the ways the Inkas anthropomorphized certain rocks and how these acts of anthropomorphism supported Inka imperialism. But as I sought to express Inka concepts in English, I realized that “anthropomorphism” did not adequately describe what the Inkas understood themselves to be doing. Rather, I could only describe what the Inkas did by wedging their thinking into ill-suited taxonomies born of Euro-Western epistemology. In the end, I discussed the pururawqa, a selection of specific rocks who animated in order to help Inka armies defeat a powerful enemy. Following the battle, they re-petrified with the promise to spring to life again to defend the Inkas should the need arise. More than 30 pururawqa inhabited Cusco, Peru, the Inkas’ capital; there, they received offerings and were revered.10 While at first “anthropomorphism” would seem to describe the Inkas’ treatment of pururawqa rocks, an approach informed by Indigenous Andean oral culture both past and present, suggests that the Inkas were not interested in conceiving of rocks as “humans,” or even as the equivalents of “humans.” Rather, they were petrous allies of the Inkas who, when the occasion required, could and would transmute themselves into warriors. Rather than being human-like, the pururawqa shared common interests and goals with the Inkas. It was the alliance with earth-beings, to borrow a term from Marisol de la Cadena, that was memorialized both in narratives about pururawqa and in the pururawqa rocks themselves.11 343

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To describe a pururawqa as an “anthropomorphized rock” would be to displace the Inka conceptualization of a sentient and potentially animate petrous being who watched over Cusco, replacing it with language more consistent with the Euro-Western intellectual tradition in which rocks are inert. For several decades, ethnographers have inveighed against universalizing culturally specific concepts. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, for example, argues that explaining Indigenous thought by translating it into Western modes is to neutralize it.12 Bob Scholte, more forthrightly, condemns the so-called rationalization of Indigenous thought as “epistemocide,” and Sarah Hunt discusses the epistemic violence inherent in descriptions of Indigenous American knowledge production as “myth making.”13 What is called for, then, is a serious examination of the ways art historical approaches naturalize and universalize a certain kind of anthropocentrism that concomitantly delegitimizes Indigenous thought, especially that which has been already universalized as “art.” Pururawqa possessed sight as did many of the potentially animate rocks revered by the Inkas and other Andean peoples. In addition to petrous warriors, the Autonomous-era Inkas interacted with many natural topographic features, especially mountains and large rocks or outcrops. Such places were regarded as wak’a (huaca), a word in Quechua (or Runasimi), the language of the Inkas and other Andean peoples, that has no exact equivalent in other tongues.14 It may be provisionally translated—but still not well understood—as sacrality, although the term wak’a is today applied to sacred things, landscape features, and shrines.15 In addition to pururawqa, other types of sentient stones included the rulers’ stone brothers; petrous guardians of places such as fields, communities, and valleys; rocks who enforced or commemorated boundaries; and those who embodied periods of time, quarries, and sacred mountains.16 For all of these, the rocks’ sight was critical. This is not to say that studies of the rock carvers, the rulers and imperial administrators who oversaw rock carving and building, and the human viewers who interacted with sentient rocks were unimportant to the study of the Inkas’ stonework. Rather, it is to say that not considering the rock’s point of view ignores an aspect of visual culture that was critically important in Inka thought. Inkas and other Andeans did not look at a sacred rock without knowing that the rock was looking back at them.17 One of the most renowned and sacred of sighted rocks in the Cusco valley was the Sapaqurinka (see Figure 25.1).18 Today it is known as the Inka Throne. It was carved in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century from a gray striated outcrop located in the midst of the large architectural complex of Saqsaywaman. Measuring roughly 10 feet by 39 feet, the Throne consists of two seat-like carvings facing roughly east. To the west, and arching above the seats, are two tiers of precisely carved steps. According to accounts from the Spanish colonial period, the Sapaqurinka itself was venerated and offerings were made to it; indeed, we are told that this place where rulers sat was the reason the whole of the Saqsaywaman complex was revered.19 The Sapaqurinka overlooks Cusco. In Andean culture there was, and is, a clear and direct relationship between sight and governance.20 Indigenous Andeans today, for example, characterize mountains as the owners of everything within their viewsheds. Mountains are called “great watchers,” and vision relates directly to their authority.21 Because mountains own all they survey, one who sees a mountain, stands in its realm. Although not so august nor so powerful as the great watchers, other elevated earth-beings were also revered for their lines of sight. Sitting and seeing from a superior position, the Sapaqurinka’s occupants not only overlooked Cusco, but they would also have met the gaze of a great watcher, the powerful, sacred mountain called Ausangate, located to the Throne’s left. Ausangate is a glaciated peak who was, and still is, regarded as the most 344

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Figure 25.1  Inka, Sapaqurinka, late 15th–early 16th c., 10 × 39 ft., Saqsaywaman, Cusco, Peru. Photo credit: Carolyn Dean.

powerful of mountains in the Cusco region. From the perspective of the Sapaqurinka, a sacred hill called Wanakawri is to the right. Although Wanakawri is much more diminutive than Ausangate, it was nevertheless critical to Inka authority. According to Inka origin accounts, it was on Wanakawri that one of the brothers of the Inka founder turned to stone. The brother’s petrifaction signaled the imposition of Inka authority—both political and spiritual—over the site of Cusco. With Ausangate and Wanakawri, the Sapaqurinka forms a triad of “watchers.” Together they governed and protected the Cusco valley, its resources, and its inhabitants. When Inka rulers and others sat in the Sapaqurinka’s seats they joined the ranks of revered overseers. The Sapaqurinka, however, did not so much participate in the sitter’s sight as the sitters participated in the petrous seat’s sight. By sitting on—or rather, conjoining with—the Sapaqurinka, those who sat merged with the sighted rock, participating in the rock’s vision. Both seat and sitter situated themselves within a nested hierarchy of overseers whose oversight was (and is) limited to territories befitting their relative sizes—from expansive mountainous vistas to valleys, villages, and single fields.22 Some of these petrous overseers were said to have once been human (runa) and certain human beings had become rock overseers. Often ancestral and identified as the petrified founders of communities, these rocks were always potentially animate despite their lithic composition. There were also once-and-future animate rocks who were never described as having been human. Rather, the runa-to-rock or rock-to-runa transmutations were part of a larger system and practice that recognized the sightedness and sentience of petrous beings in a web of intersubjective relationships, all of which are ultimately derived from the thinking earth. The sociologist Vanessa Watts coins the term “Place-Thought” to describe the common Indigenous 345

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American understanding that land is sentient, and that humans and extra-humans alike derive their agency from their earth origins.23 The exclusion of sentient rocks from subject positions has real-world consequences. An account recorded in the community of Amaru near Cusco makes the case. It tells of a petrous boundary marker (saywa) that a landlord ordered buried because he feared that with the stone as an eyewitness to his land seizure, the Indigenous farmers would be able to reclaim what was theirs.24 Current failures to recognize sentient Andean rocks thus bury, blind, and silence them.

Beyond the Inka Inka understandings of a sighted, sentient, and agentic earth did not emerge from nothing. In the Andes, all along the coast from north to south, geoglyphs date to the Autonomous era, some as early as 300 BCE and some as late as Inka times. Of these, the Nasca lines, most dating 1–500 CE, are best known, likely because they include images: spider, monkey, lizard, various birds, and more (see Figure 25.2). The pictographs, however, are far outnumbered by geometric configurations, including lines, centers, and rays. Puzzlement over the meaning and function of the geoglyphs stems from the apparent absence of a human audience. Why would people take the time and exert the effort to draw lines in the unpopulated pampas between river valleys when neither lines nor figures are comprehensible from ground level? Since the 1980s, research has increasingly pointed to the importance of mountains and “natural” features of the local and regional topography.25 These are earth-entities who influence(d) the availability of water on the dry desert coast. Rivers of the south coastal valleys, including the Nazca River which does not have water for some

Figure 25.2  Nasca, Bird geoglyph, c. 500 CE, Nazca, Peru. Photo credit: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0  , via Wikimedia Commons.

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months of the year and may remain completely dry for several years at a stretch, depend on rainfall in the far-off mountains to the east. More important were subterranean streams. Nasca peoples constructed an elaborate system of underground filtration canals, allowing farmers to practice intensive agriculture in their unforgiving desert landscape. Human incapacity to see the figures and the full lengths of lines has led to highly imaginative suppositions about extraterrestrial visitors to Peru’s south coast. A more down-toearth theory attends to the fact that the Nasca geoglyphs are visible to the mountains from above and to the earth, whose body they decorate, from below. The anthropologist Johan Reinhard describes a contemporary ritual held in Sabaya in which a straight line links the community to a regional prominence; participants indicate that “The [mountain] deity looks directly down the line to Sabaya and focuses its attention, and bounty, upon it.”26 Straight lines serve to direct the gaze of earth-beings. Relatedly, circles, spirals, and other geometric figures focus the attention of these entities. The pictographs adorn the earth’s surface in ways that parallel the painted and embroidered surfaces of Nasca clay vessels and woven garments.27 The role of the sighted earth as an important—and likely the most important—viewer demands a full consideration of who was (is) watching. Beyond the Andes, particular ways of acknowledging the sightedness of extra-human ­subject-objects are found across the Autonomous Americas and into the contemporary period. Qualities attributed exclusively to human beings in Euro-Western thought extend across a much more expansive field in much of Indigenous thinking. In her study of the famous Structure 23 lintels at Yaxchilan, Mexico, the art historian Claudia Brittenham focuses on the issue of audience, pointing out that even with their original brightly colored paint, the lintels were never optimally viewed by living humans. The architectural setting—in a passageway, poorly lit, above the head, horizontally arranged, and downward facing—inhibits ordinary human visual comprehension. With every inconvenient viewing, human spectators were reminded that they were not the most important viewers. Brittenham concludes that the sight that mattered most was that of the person whose image is depicted on the stone.28 Among the Autonomous-era Maya, and continuing today, parts of the built environment, as well as smaller items of material culture such as benches (thrones) and ceramic vessels, were “ensouled,” which is to say vivified.29 Buildings, and even their lintels, exercised sight, as did the personages depicted on various monuments. In some cases, the identity of the structure’s patron merged with the work, thereby dissolving differences between representation and presentation.30 Given these mergers, “sight” apparently extended to the stone without necessitating distinctions between persons depicted, the depiction, the stone into which the depiction was carved, and the building into which the carved stone was placed. Both the lintel and the entities portrayed on it, were afforded the best view of what was depicted. The archaeologist Shirley Boteler Mock identifies the offering of dedicatory caches to “ensoul” parts of the Maya built environment as a “process of humanization” or anthropomorphism.31 What matters here is that Maya—and more generally Mesoamerican—­ practices did not produce an anthropocentrism, a hierarchical binary of human and not human. Rather it recognized that both natural and artifactual elements shared properties with humans. Other-than-human animals, structures, monuments, and smaller items participated in Maya sociality. The Maya concept of sentient life was and is expansive; the social world in which human beings participate includes a range of “ensouled” material culture. What is important for this discussion is that studies that consider only human participants (maker, patron, audience) are likely to disregard Indigenous understandings in which extra-human eyes matter deeply. 347

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Ugly Bags of Mostly Water In a 1988 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, newly encountered inorganic life forms describe the crew of the starship Enterprise as “ugly bags of mostly water.” Recently, thinking about—and taking seriously—extra-human perspectives has spilled over from Science Fiction. Across the academy, posthumanists are questioning the ways humans distinguish themselves from other subject-objects. Parallel lines of thought, characterized as the “ontological turn,” populate the writings of anthropologists who draw on the understandings of Indigenous peoples with whom they have worked.32 One of anthropology’s most important assertions is that people outside the influence of Europe arrived at “posthumanist” positions well in advance of the twentieth century. Posthumanism is, therefore, only “new” from a Euro-Western perspective.33 Anthropologist Zoe Todd, with particular reference to the work of Bruno Latour, criticizes the failure “to credit Indigenous thinkers for the millennia of engagement with sentient environments.”34 Indeed, the “post” in posthuman reveals profound and willful ignorance of other ontologies; for many Indigenous cultures across the globe, “never-just-human” would be more precise than “posthuman.” In addition to Todd (Métis), important work on this topic has been done by Indigenous scholars such as Brian Burkhart (Cherokee), Sarah Hunt (Kwakwaka’wakw), Rauna Kuokkanen (Sami), and Vanessa Watts (Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee).35 Viveiros de Castro notes the distinction drawn between humans as a species and the human condition in the thinking of Amazonian peoples with whom he works; he advances the term “perspectivism” in recognition that across the Americas diverse entities, both alive and inert, “natural” and artifactual, occupy subject positions. He provides a number of useful examples including the following: “what we see as a muddy waterhole, the tapirs see as a great ceremonial house.”36 To apply perspectivism to the Inka case, we might understand that the Inkas did not make rocks in their own image (as God made man in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition). Instead, the Inkas recognized that the human condition was shared by certain rocks, and so was not a “human” condition at all. Rather than expanding the definition of “human,” Cathrine Degnen, among many other anthropologists and archaeologists, prefers to enlarge the semantic terrain of “personhood” and so encompass any entity who is brought into being by means of reciprocal fields of social relations; she concludes that persons can be human, but they also can be something not human.37 Various terms—more-than-human, other-than-human, extra-human, non-human animates, and metapersons—have been proposed as alternative ways of referring to nonhuman subject-objects. Niggling at the edges of these discussions is an apparent resistance to epistemic difference. That resistance is exposed in the universalizing impulses of “theory” that all too often exports Euro-Western categories of thought. The concept of “human,” especially when illogically opposed to “animal,” is just one of many examples. Sometimes the incongruence between Euro-Western theory and Indigenous thought registers as a failure of translation, the incapacity of one language to communicate alien concepts.38 At its core, however, is ontological discord. One decolonizing step is to leave ineffable terms untranslated. Of course, those untranslated terms need not remain unexplained. Although scholars attempt to elucidate them, they will always, inevitably fall short. The “shortfall” produces interlingual texts, foregrounds ambiguities, and leaves blurred the boundary between words and worlds. One result might be the opacity called for so eloquently by poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant.39 This opacity extends beyond language to include the visual. A certain 348

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destabilization of meaning, effervescing from incommensurable ontologies, will linger as traces of decolonial efforts. Another step towards decolonization is to face what Kuokkanen terms the “epistemic ignorance” of the Euro-Western intellectual tradition, which customarily ignores, excludes, or dismisses Indigenous knowledges.40 For art history in particular, a discipline that converts certain Indigenous subjects into art objects, decolonization requires a reconsideration of how art historians write, how museums exhibit, and who is listened to. Ongoing consultation with those who communicate with, and work alongside, those things now integrated into the Euro-West as “art” is essential. But decolonization is not only central to the work of scholars who learn from Indigenous visual cultures. Those who study Euro-Western art traditions might usefully query whether their methods advance exclusionary epistemologies. Those who produce theory might consider the consequences of certain universalizing concepts and question whether their “new” turns are really new at all. Particularly untenable is the continued assertion of a universalized humanity which sets itself apart from all other living things and, all too often, above them. A counter-process, that of “dishumanization,” seeks to provide balance.

Notes 1 This chapter was formulated on the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi people. I acknowledge the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, which is stewarding the lands occupied by UC Santa Cruz. 2 “Euro-Western” is intended to locate the origins of the commonly used term “West,” in Europe, but also to indicate its global reach. 3 Other prefixes, including non-, in-, un- preter-, other-than-, and more, were rejected because all of these suggested the exclusion, rather than the decentering, of humans, which is called for here. The question mark at the end of the title acknowledges the deficiencies in available terminology. 4 Angela Last, “Anti-colonial Ontologies: A Dialogue,” in Coloniality, Ontology, and the Question of the Posthuman, ed. Mark Jackson (London: Routledge, 2017). See also the important work of Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. 5 Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Scorned Subjects in Colonial Objects,” Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 13, no. 4 (2017): 414–436. 6 Aubrey Hobart proposes the term “Autonomous” to describe the era of Indigenous American history prior to European colonization; see Hobart’s, “Treasures and Splendors: Exhibiting Colonial Latin American Art in U.S. Museums, 1920–2020” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2018), 14–15. “Autonomous” both avoids the implicit bias of the term “pre-historic” and unlike “pre-Columbian,” “pre-Hispanic,” and “pre-colonial,” does not convey a sense of inevitability. It also avoids labeling civilizations that thrived in the Americas as “ancient” implying that Indigenous Americans were mired in the past while Europeans progressed from ancient through medieval (pre-modern) and into the Renaissance (early modern). 7 For a discussion of the colonizing effects of the term “art,” see Dean, “The Trouble with (the Term) Art,” Art Journal 65, no. 2 (2006): 24–32. 8 Rosi Braidotti, “‘We’ May Be in This Together, But We Are Not All Human and We Are Not One and the Same,” Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities 1, no. 1 (2020): 28. Others have traced the origins of western anthropocentrism to the twin Judeo-Christian and Greek foundations of the European intellectual tradition; see, e.g., Carlos Fausto, Art Effects: Image, Agency, and Ritual in Amazonia, trans. David Rodgers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 263–305. For influential thinking about efforts to exclude those of African ancestry from “humanity” by means of racialization, see Alexander Ghedi Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke ­University Press, 2014).

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Carolyn Dean 9 Dean, “Notes from the Field: Anthropomorphism,” Art Bulletin 94, no. 1 (2012): 15–16. 10 The seventeenth-century Jesuit chronicler Bernabé Cobo, relying on earlier manuscripts, specifically identifies more than two dozen pururawqa (pururauca); see Cobo, Inca Religion and Customs (1653), trans. and ed. Roland Hamilton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 54–81. 11 Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 12 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “The Relative Native,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 3 (2013): 489. 13 Bob Scholte, “Reason and Culture: The Universal and the Particular Revisited,” American Anthropologist 86, no. 4 (1984): 964; Sarah Hunt, “Ontologies of Indigeneity: The Politics of Embodying a Concept,” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 1 (2014): 27–32. 14 Regina Harrison, Signs, Songs and Memory in the Andes: Translating Quechua Language and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 32–54. See also the concise discussion in Frank Salomon, “Introductory Essay: The Huarochirí Manuscript,” in The Huarochirí Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion, trans. and ed. Frank Salomon and Jorge Urioste (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 16–19. While wak’a and huaca are the two most popular spellings today, the word was often spelled guaca in colonial-period writing. 15 Bruce Mannheim and Guillermo Salas Carreño, “Wak’as: Entifications of the Andean Sacred,” in The Archaeology of Wak’as: Explorations of the Sacred in the Pre-Columbian Andes, ed. Tamara L. Bray (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015), 47–72. 16 Carolyn Dean, A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 40–61. 17 Although I am interested here primarily in the sense of sight, other senses were employed by other-than-humans as well. Oral histories record instances of both organic and inorganic entities interacting with other entities, thinking, feeling, and remembering. 18 For a fuller discussion, see Dean, “Fame of Thrones: Seats, Sights, and Sanctity among the Inka,” Material Religion 11, no. 3 (2015): 355–385. 19 Cobo, Inca Religion and Customs, 57. 20 Dean, Culture of Stone, 130–141; Dean, “Fame of Thrones.” 21 Catherine J. Allen. The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community, (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 41. 22 Dean, Culture of Stone, 44–46. 23 Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European World Tour!),” Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education and Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 21. 24 Cecilia Granadino, Cuentos de Nuestros Abuelos Quechuas: Recuperando la Tradición Oral (Cusco: Centro de Difusión Cultural Wasapay, 1993), 142–155, 207. 25 See Evan Hadingham, Lines to the Mountain Gods: Nazca and the Mysteries of Peru (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). For the linkage between lines, water, fertility, and mountains, see Johan Reinhard, “The Nazca Lines, Water and Mountains: An Ethnoarchaeological Study,” in Recent Studies in Pre-Columbian Archaeology, ed. Nicholas J. Saunders and Olivier de Montmollin (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1988), vol 2: 363–414. 26 Reinhard, “Nazca Lines,” 373. 27 For consideration of Andean linkages between textiles and topography, see Marianne Hogue, “Cosmology in Inca Tunics and Tectonics,” in Andean Textile Traditions: Papers from the 2001 Mayer Center Symposium at the Denver Art Museum, ed. Margaret Young-Sánchez and Fronia W. Simpson (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2006); see also César Paternosto, The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art (1989), trans. Esther Allen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). 28 Claudia Brittenham, “Architecture, Vision, and Ritual: Seeing Maya Lintels at Yaxchilan Structure 23,” The Art Bulletin 101, no. 3 (2019): 8–36. 29 Many scholars discuss the concept of ensoulment. See, e.g., essays in The Sowing and the Dawning: Termination, Dedication, and Transformation in the Archaeological and Ethnographic R ­ ecord of Mesoamerica, ed. Shirley Boteler Mock (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998). 30 Brian Stross, “Seven Ingredients in Mesoamerican Ensoulment: Dedication and Termination in Tenejapa,” in The Sowing and the Dawning: Dedication, Termination, and Transformation in the Archaeological and Ethnographic Record of Mesoamerica, ed. Shirley Boteler Mock

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Dishumanizing Art History? (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 31. For the important distinction between representation and presentation, see Dean, Culture of Stone, 40–64. 31 Mock, Sowing and the Dawning, 4–9. 32 See, for example, Philippe Descola, La Selva Culta: Simbolismo y Praxis en la Ecología de los Achuar (1986), trans. Juan Carrera Colin and Xavier Catta Quelen, revised by Frederic Illouz, (Quito: Abya-Yala, 1998); Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Viveiros de Castro, “Relative Native,” and “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” trans. Julia Sauma and Martin Holbraad, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 3 (1998): 469–488. 33 Els Lagrou, “Copernicus in the Amazon: Ontological Turnings from the Perspective of the Amerindian Ethnologies,” Sociología & Antropología 8, no. 1 (2018): 134–135. 34 Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (2016): 6. 35 Following Sundberg, I use “Indigenous” to refer to groups with ancestral ties or claims to particular lands prior to colonization by outside powers and whose nations remain within states created by settler colonialism; see Juanita Sundberg, “Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies,” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 1 (2014): 34. Although there are certain ontological and epistemological commonalities across Indigenous nations, the heterogeneity of “Indigenous” peoples should be observed and respected. 36 Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis,” 478. His work on perspectivism builds on what Kaj Århem identifies as the “perspectival quality” (cualidad perspectiva) of Makuna thought, as well as that of other native inhabitants of Amazonia; see Århem, “Ecosofia makuna,” in La Selva Humanizada: Ecología Alternativa en el Trópico Húmedo Colombiano, ed. François Correa, (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología, 1990), 105–122. 37 Cathrine Degnen, Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Course (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 121–150. On ways of referring to and thinking about otherthan-human subjects, see also Benjamin Alberti and Tamara Bray, “Animating Archaeology: Of Subjects, Objects, and Alternative Ontologies,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19, no. 3 (2009); Mario Blaser, “Ontology and Indigeneity: On the Political Ontology of Heterogeneous Assemblages,” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 1 (2014): 49–58; De la Cadena, Earth Beings and “Runa: Human but Not Only,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 2 (2014): 253–259; Fausto, Art Effects; Lagrou, “Copernicus in the Amazon”; and Todd, “Decolonial Dreams: Unsettling the Academy through Namewak,” in The New (New) Corpse, ed. Caroline Picard (Chicago, IL: Green Lantern, 2015), https://www.academia.edu/10351713/ Decolonial_Dreams_unsettling_the_academy_through_namewak. 38 For discussion of the history of Euro-Western debates regarding translation, see John Leavitt, “World and Worlds: Ethnography and Theories of Translation,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 2 (2014): 193–220. 39 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990), trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), 111–120. 40 Rauna Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007), 5.

Selected Bibliography Braidotti, Rosi. “‘We’ May Be in This Together, But We Are Not All Human and We Are Not One and the Same.” Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities 1, no. 1 (2020): 26–31. Dean, Carolyn. “Notes from the Field: Anthropomorphism.” Art Bulletin 94, no. 1 (2012): 15–16. Dean, Carolyn, and Dana Leibsohn. “Scorned Subjects in Colonial Objects.” Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 13, no. 4 (2017): 414–436. Degnen, Cathrine. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Course. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Hunt, Sarah. “Ontologies of Indigeneity: the Politics of Embodying a Concept.” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 1 (2014): 27–32.

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Carolyn Dean Last, Angela. “Anti-Colonial Ontologies: A Dialogue.” In Coloniality, Ontology, and the Question of the Posthuman. Edited by Mark Jackson. London: Routledge, 2017. Leavitt, John. “World and Worlds: Ethnography and Theories of Translation.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 2 (2014): 193–220. Todd, Zoe. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (2016): 4–22. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Translated by Julia Sauma and Martin Holbraad. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 3 (1998): 469–488. Watts, Vanessa. “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European World Tour!).” Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education and Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 20–34.

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26 THE DIGITAL VOICE AS POSTCOLONIAL PROXY Pamela N. Corey

In 2013, British-Singaporean artist Erika Tan (b. 1967, Singapore) was unable to attend a book launch in Singapore for Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You, a volume of texts edited by the artist, responding to the 2011–2012 exhibition Camping and Tramping through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya.1 In lieu of her physical presence, Tan asked the event organizers to screen a single-channel video titled A Presentation by Proxy. Through synthesized voice and text, the presentation’s content is delivered by a historical figure, Halimah Binti Abdullah, a Malayan woman who performed the craft of weaving at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in London. Abdullah is made present as the source of enunciation through computerized, heavily accented English-language speech, made legible through subtitles themselves marked by syntactic glitches. Before eye continue, Erika encouraged me to give a little introduction to myself, s­ aying that on these occasions audiences require if not demand to know ones provenance. This is especially in the case when you step in to replace someone. My name is Halimah Binti Abdulla, and eye am also an artist, a performance artist. You may not yet be familiar with my work as eye am based in England and have not yet been able as yet to return to Singapore, eye have however, some works collected at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum. Eye have also participated, in one of the biggest exhibitions in London which took over an entire area in Wembly. … The performances I undertook for this exhibition were durational works, taking place during the day and night. You might describe these works as socially engaged or relational works, although I think of them more as provocations to the status quo.2 The presentation’s audio-visual dimension turns on this dissonant correspondence of text and speech, set against images of archival postcards and photographs from the Empire Exhibition (Figure 26.1), digital animated renderings of a mysterious green gem-like stone (an adze), and ultimately a transition to a screening of Alain Resnais’ 1953 essay film Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die). 353

DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-31

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Figure 26.1  Erika Tan, A Presentation by Proxy, 2014, single channel video, 20ʹ15ʺ. Author’s screenshot.

Despite its conceptualization as a compromise rather than a work in and of itself – a stopgap for the artist’s absence at the book launch – the presentation serves a crucial role in catalyzing Tan’s subsequent and significant body of ambitious multimedia iterations centering Halimah Binti Abdullah, “the forgotten weaver,” carried out from 2015 to 2019. In this, A Presentation by Proxy served as a supplement – additional, framing, yet defining – in terms of guiding and representing Tan’s ongoing as well as emergent concerns surrounding questions of postcolonial representation and repatriation, historiography, and the entanglement of artistic objectivity and subjectivity. Through the deliberately disconcertingly manufactured voice of Abdullah herself, the presentation thus served as a threshold to the artist’s continued attempts to articulate the complexities of these quandaries. For this chapter, I would like to examine the specificities of audio-visual elements within A Presentation by Proxy and selected aspects of the larger body of work about “the forgotten weaver” to question the ways in which the conjunction of speech, text, and voice in the digital medium elide the uncanny, the ventriloquial, and the parodic in troubling ways.3 In the materialization of Abdullah as historical but also posthuman presence, and the accentuation of the glitch in this uncanny reenactment, Abdullah’s/Tan’s mechanized speech foregrounds the acceptance of irresolution as crucial to the continuation of postcolonial address and decolonial work. To do so, Tan gave Abdullah voice, literally, through synthesized speech, but arguably, rendered her more so as an absence emphasized through excessive, over-produced forms of presence and oral performativity, first in the presentation as well as through later iterations of the project. In this, Abdullah’s subjectivity is repetitively summoned but kept at bay by proxies, her spectrality sustained yet elusively materialized through fabricated forms of speech, discourse, and voice. 354

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Some contextualization of the work is first necessary, both in terms of the discourses it inhabits as well as how Abdullah is configured as a proxy for questions of a historical, ontological, and personal nature across Tan’s work. In her focus on the instrumentalization and transnational circulation of a gendered, subaltern figure of cultural labor, used to configure colonial/national imaginaries (of Malaya as well as that of Great Britain), Tan retrieves and imaginatively reconstructs lesser-known histories from colonial accounts. This is recognized as a postcolonial imperative across a number of oft-cited paradigmatic methodologies in contemporary art, such as the archival impulse, the artist as historian, parafictional and historiographical art, as examples.4 But Tan’s choice to work with the digital medium raises questions about the role of technology in not only addressing postcolonial history and identity but also offering possibilities for decolonial inquiry. Such mediations may yield methods for destabilizing authorial control, de- and re-centering the self (or selves), and bringing into focus alternative pathways to knowledge vis-à-vis deviation.5 In brief, this is a definition of decoloniality that occupies the terrain of intellectual and artistic work more so than tangible, material acts constituting forms of reparation and repatriation, such as those of persons, objects, land, or juridical rights. Decolonization describes the historical but also present-day politico-cultural processes that impact the lived realities of disenfranchised and marginalized communities on the ground. On the other hand, postcolonialism, decoloniality, and de-imperialization have been theorized as holding the potential to reach into deep ideological terrain; proponents have argued that transforming imagination, subjectivity, and apparatuses of knowledge production are fundamental to effecting lasting change and reconstituting institutions and mechanisms of power.6 However, in the context of museological discourses about decolonization, scholars and artists have cautioned against the perception of restitution and the reworking of curatorial methods as conclusive resolutions. As art historian Nana Adusei-Poku has argued, “Museums that adopt this language don’t have to deal with their inherent racism; they merely need to find different ways to display collections of stolen Indigenous art.”7 The caution here is that such museological ‘solutions’ are palliative, a way of filling absence that perpetuates forgetting and erasure. Tan herself has contributed to these discussions through works that took the form of museum and archival interventions, as I will discuss momentarily. But her broader practice continues to pursue the question of absence as a problem but also as that which serves the constitution of a museum collection, and history, more broadly. At a seminar organized by the University of Arts London Decolonising Arts Institute, Tan was asked to respond to the question “what should the point of a collection be?”8 To this she responded by first asking “what is culture and what are we collecting?” Taking a cue from a recent text by Coco Fusco, titled “We Need New Institutions, Not New Art,” Tan emphasized that there is so much cultural activity and artistic production that is never collected and thus never receives institutional, hence, historical recognition and representation.9 As such, it is inherently impossible for such institutions to ‘represent’ culture, and we should not pretend that they can. She then went on to consider how museums and institutional collections can attempt to address this through alternative modes of collaboration and curation: through the active creation of opportunities and situations that present new ways of working with materials that in her words, don’t sit too happily and comfortably on walls. Tan underscores here the problematic notion that a museum collection can be decolonized or serve as the basis for cultural representation when the very notions of incompleteness and misrepresentation are fundamental to the creation of an object-centered collection. 355

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Her interest in “objects with no shadows,” or those things and practices which are formless, fugitive, ill-defined, or that remain un-illuminated and un-activated due to their perpetual residence in storage and the archives, threads through much of her practice. Tan was invited to explicitly pursue such questions when she was invited by curators Ahmad Mashadi and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, following conversations begun in 2009, to “cannibalize” the remainders of the exhibition Camping and Tramping through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya, which had itself turned on excavating and curating its archives and collections to explore and make transparent its own development as an institutional artefact of British Empire in Southeast Asia.10 Tan’s iteration of this museological cannibalism and institutional critique, titled Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You? (2013), comprised installations of archival and museum objects, and works in sound, photography, and video that she created, curated, and assembled alongside her research into the institutional holdings and archives of museums and archives in Singapore, Malaysia, and London that had developed out of former British Malaya.11 The video work Repatriating the Object with No Shadow: Along, Against, Within, and Through (2013–2014) features the artist’s own voice-over musing about the means through which Malay bodies, including humans, animals, and cultural objects, inhabited and continue to inhabit spaces of museological and ethnographic display, and historical memory, through representations, for example, such forms as textual and oral accounts, or plaster and digital reproductions. The latter of these serves as a recurring feature in Tan’s work, both in earlier and future moving image projects, where landscapes, vernacular houses, stone adzes, and tigers are among those images and objects rendered as digitally animated forms. They are both rematerialized and dematerialized due to the nature of the digital medium, alluding to their relationships to disappearance, dislocation, and repatriation. The historical reproductions, used to represent and perform Malay culture and even more so British science and technology, served as counterparts to the ways in which actual bodies were used to contextualize and authenticate exhibits and pavilions at the spectacular colonial and world exhibitions that saw their apogee in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was during her research for Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You that Tan was made aware of Halimah Binti Abdullah through archival documentation that briefly mentioned her participation in and her death during the 1924 Empire Exhibition in Wembley, and her burial in an unmarked grave in Woking, England.12 Encouraged by curator Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, who had initially researched and written about Abdullah for the exhibition catalog for Camping and Tramping, Tan located the approximate location of her interment and conducted some preliminary research into Abdullah’s genealogy and background. Her research was limited due to the dearth of archival materials, but also by the artist’s choice.13 Tan was not interested in the literal projects of historical recuperation and repatriation, which would entail extensive processes of research and negotiation, with an implicated point of conclusion and a centering of the artist as researcher. Rather, she was more interested in enabling Abdullah to ‘speak’, in a sense, to the more open-ended question of her historical role as an artisan/artist, and how such recognition is affirmed through her significance as a textual fragment, a historical figure, and a cultural representative in the contexts of colonial and present-day transnational exhibitionary circulations, whether an empire exhibition or an international biennial. Tan affirms that these questions conjoin, or rather, deliberately confound, historical and contemporary issues, as well as the roles of Tan and Abdullah as artistic subject and object. 356

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These questions became the focus of A Presentation by Proxy, which, as mentioned earlier, was initially devised to enable the artist to be ‘virtually’ present at the book launch for Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You? in Singapore. While A Presentation by Proxy served as paratext for the book, following Gérard Genette, as part of the framing apparatus that presents and makes the text present as a book for its publics (e.g., a preface), it augured a similar function for the subsequent body of works that had not yet even been conceptualized by Tan.14 Citing Philippe Lejeune, Genette theorizes the space and function of paratext as a threshold, a liminal border zone, the “fringe of the printed text which, in reality, controls the whole reading.”15 Tan’s ensuing projects centering the figure of Halimah Binti Abdullah would take the form of staged debates and filmed performances as well as or alongside installations with weaving looms and digital projections, with iterations of the project shown in Venice, Holland, China, Singapore, Malaysia, and the UK from roughly 2015 to 2019. At the core of the series are questions about the gaps in historical and art historical narratives, alternative definitions and modes of repatriation, and the fluidity of artistic presence and subjectivity. Yet, these complex artistic realizations initially emerged from a digitized mediation ­between presentation and representation, playing with their mutualism, that was first distilled in A Presentation by Proxy essentially through ventriloquism. Abdullah’s synthesized voice, marked as female and foreign through accented speech, introduces herself as Tan’s colleague and her representative at the book launch, and explains that Tan asked Abdullah to speak on her behalf. In order to present the book, Abdullah articulates her identity as an artist that Tan met at the 1924 Empire Exhibition. The exhibition is never verbally identified explicitly as such within the film, only indicated by the montage of postcards, photographs, and film footage. Abdullah emphasizes that Tan had been seeking her out for possible collaboration. Abdullah recounts her engagement with the Empire Exhibition in the language of contemporary art, describing her durational performances and foray into socially engaged works at an artistic residency space in Wembley, and recounting their positive public reception. Abdullah continues to present the two artists’ aligned interests as grounds for future dialogue: As artists, we are both interested in the transformation of objects from one state to another, or one use to another. We both weave our way through the material at hand, recognising that at times, that although the final end product of our work is important, it is often the process, and our presence, which affect the works interpretations. With this in mind, we will be making a film performance in which we will feature as key figures but however, be absent, instead using actors to call forth our presence. Abdullah then describes Brookwood, the place where she continues to reside (in reality, the actual location of her remains), which serves as host to a large Muslim community in London. She then introduces Alain Resnais’ film Les Statues Meurent Aussi and the role of Tan and herself as spectators and interlocutors for the film, watching it (together with the audience) from the perspective of collaborative filmmakers questioning how museums situate objects as historical artefacts, or as historical information, as opposed to timeless works of art.16 Speaking as and not for Abdullah became a central quandary in the broader series of works, a task initially and literally realized in Tan’s use of text-to-speech technology to fabricate her voice. Yet, it was not such a straightforward act of mediation from script 357

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to speech synthesis. Tan’s English-language script could not be legibly understood in the ­Indonesian-language speech chosen by the artist to vocalize the text.17 The text could only be interpreted through the program, and the resulting errors in the computerized vocal interpretation necessitated selective editing of the script to allow for phonetic accommodation in the Indonesian language. “I” became “eye,” for example. These deliberate errors in writing, made evident in the inclusion of subtitles, demonstrate the yielding of textual control to the differences of spoken language, undermining the authority of the written text over orality. While Abdullah’s voice is already uncanny by virtue of its acousmatic and mechanized nature, the transparency of the errors introduced through the technological mediation hinges on Tan’s choice to conjoin text and speech in audio-visual form.18 Glitches appear in spoken form through the computerized voice’s erroneous pronunciations and unnatural cadence, pacing, and truncations, alongside syntactical errors in the corresponding subtitles, forcing the audience to perform cognitive repairs while listening/reading in real time. In affirming this audio-visual-linguistic incommensurability, Tan thus embraces the glitch as it has been theorized in media theory and sound art. According to Andrew Brooks, Glitch, as a process-based art form, destabilizes the centrality of the author in the process of creation. By creating conditions that utilize chance and error as compositional tools, glitch artists create conditions that give rise to emergent systems in which agency is radically distributed.19 The glitch that underscores A Presentation by Proxy serves as a metonym for the larger project of speaking as/speaking for the historically marginalized figure of Abdullah, an impetus that would unfold as a contested space of representation. For Tan, the glitch exposes and brings into focus how technological mediation may serve as a site of critique and possibility. As Mark Nunes argues, error is an opening for potentiality within a technologized culture of information dominated by the logic of maximum performance and efficiency: In its ‘failure to communicate,’ error signals a path of escape from the predictable confines of informatic control: an opening, a virtuality, a poiesis. … While often cast as a passive, yet pernicious deviation from intended results, error can also signal a potential for a strategy of misdirection, one that invokes a logic of control to create an opening for variance, play, and unintended outcomes.20 Key to the effect on the audience of the oral mistranslation in A Presentation by Proxy are its affects. Only in the awkward conjunction of text and speech does the presentation appear humorous but insidiously so, if the source of humor is derived from errors in pronunciation and writing marked by foreignness, both non-human and human. In the content itself, humor may also be derived from the glaring anachrony of language, and the discrepancy between the agency performed by Abdullah in her self-characterization as global artist and the reality of her objectification as a prop to support the narrative of the British revival of tradition and invigoration of craft industries in their Southeast Asian colonies.21 The presentation performs a parody, even a perversion, of oral history, but makes this clearly evident in its construction of an orality and a history with neither an authenticated source nor a logic of time. As such, it is a production which emphasizes its predication on absence. Abdullah, therefore, only exists as a form of mediation and error; she comes into being through a technological glitch that offers aesthetic and affective possibilities for critical 358

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interrogation today. But in the historical record, she is little more than a footnote, and her passing at the exhibition was symptomatic of a larger project of colonialist instrumentalization and media suppression. The overall affect, then, of these realizations – and in one’s scrutiny of their affective reactions to the presentation – is one of discomfort, unease, and melancholy. Tan’s scripting of Abdullah’s monologue and digital constitution of her voice asks the question of not just how she is ventriloquizing Abdullah through vocal configuration but to what extent does the artist want Abdullah to ventriloquize her, to give voice to Tan’s thinking about cultural representation, particularly from a diasporic perspective, in the global art world. We might see the artist here, and the voice, as a medium, in both senses of the word. In the ensuing projects that developed out of these questions, voice is foregrounded as metaphor and material in staging discourses of repatriation, reconstitution, and agency. Another component of the project where voice is used as performative excess to give form to historical representation but also to unsettle the notion of representation itself is a staged debate, integrated into the 2017 moving image work APA JIKA, The Mis-Placed Comma.22 The film was commissioned by the National Gallery Singapore for their experimental digital platform, unrealised, linked to their permanent displays of modern art from Singapore and Southeast Asia. The digital platform sought to open the displays to multiple perspectives and tangents of inquiry enabled by virtual pathways of engagement.23 As described by the artist, APA JIKA Takes the form of ‘debate’ as central to the discussions around Halimah’s relevance in a national institution currently engaged in postcolonial reframing of modernism. The work is sited in a former colonial law court, in a country where open debate and freedom of speech is highly monitored. The video brings together the displaced deconstructed loom, a performer of ‘Malay’ dance, and a group of young Chinese female debaters who deliberate on the legacy of the Empire Exhibition, the position of craft, the validity of archival returns and the notion of representation. Tan was conscious of the tensions and risks at work in these attempts to resurrect this historical figure through such contrived forms of speech. As the debaters in APA JIKA, The Mis-Placed Comma note, when you try to speak as those who cannot be present, you risk speaking for them – representation as superimposition and performative resolution. In the debate’s staging in Singapore, set in the conjoined structures of the former City Hall and Supreme Court Building, chosen to serve as the architecture for the new National Gallery Singapore (opened in 2015), Tan’s choices of performativity, including monologue, dance, and debate, each of which rely on the body and/or the voice, interact with the structure’s history and its transformation (Figure 26.2). For Tan, this moment of transition represented a liminal moment between a colonial and then national juridical architecture that performed Singapore’s modern identity and the opening of a museological institution that affirms its historical and national modernism.24 As Tan described, this was “a site in the process of becoming – akin to the status of work in a studio, or performances in the process of rehearsal.”25 The form of the debate itself performs the possibility of open speech (synonymous with a public sphere) in a context where such a discursive form may find itself subject to constraint. The debaters attempt to sound out a logic of representation for Abdullah by performing orality as juridical process, returning to the history of the site and of the Enlightenment-based 359

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Figure 26.2  Erika Tan, APA JIKA, The Mis-Placed Comma, 2017, 2-channel video, 8:26 min. ­Author’s screenshot.

rationale of the voice as a medium of justice. If one of the central questions at the heart of Tan’s project is the entanglement of contemporary subjectivity and historical ­representation, this is manifested through the figure of Halimah Binti Abdullah as a lever of thinking. In this, voice is more than a recurring medium. It is one of the metaphors of ­incompleteness that recur throughout Tan’s projects about Abdullah, from the filmed installation-­ in-progress of the Cham loom in the Singapore Galleries of the National Gallery Singapore, to the debates about national art histories and the place of women and craft.26 But, as I argue, voice – scripted, performed, synthesized – is a hinge of the overall project. The digitized voice in particular gives unsettling and insistent form to absence. Embodiment, or the live presence of bodies in action, has often played a role in museological efforts to provide context for their objects, for example, using craftsmen to perform the production of the objects on display. But the ways in which Tan stages voice throughout the project as both embodiment and disembodiment sustains an at-times uncomfortable sense of spectrality and indeterminacy. This foregrounds irresolution as crucial to understanding decoloniality as an ongoing process, a momentum that must be sustained through political, material efforts, but one that can also be driven by the disturbances and openings that contemporary artistic projects can offer.

Notes 1 The exhibition was curated by Ahmad Mashadi and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa for the National University of Singapore Museum. The publication was envisioned by Tan as an extension of the exhibition, and features commissioned essays and interviews, and images of the artist’s work as well as archival collections and exhibition documentation. See Erika Tan, ed., Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You? Sila Mengkanibalkan Kami, Mahu Tak? (Singapore: NUS [National University of Singapore] Museum, 2014). 2 Erika Tan, subtitles from A Presentation by Proxy, 2014, single-channel video, 20 min. 15 sec. 3 Parts of this chapter are developed from an as yet unpublished text by the author, commissioned by Tan, titled “Speech as Spectre: Voice and Historical Becoming.” 4 See, for example, Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (2004): 3–22; Mark Godfrey, “The Artist as Historian,” October 120 (2007): 140–172; Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility,” October 129 (2009): 51–84; Jane Blocker, Becoming Past: History in Contemporary Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); and Eva Kernbauer, Art, History, and Anachronic Interventions Since 1990 (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2022). 5 The inevitability of convergence between postcolonialism and media theory was addressed by Maria Fernandez in her important essay, “Postcolonial Media Theory,” Art Journal 58, no. 3 (1999): 58–73.

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The Digital Voice as Postcolonial Proxy 6 This very brief synopsis is drawn from sources including Anibal Quijano and Michael Ennis, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–580; Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Daphne V. Taylor-García, “Decolonial Historiography: Thinking about Land and Race in a Transcolonial Context,” InTensions 5 (Fall/Winter 2011): 1–24, http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue6/articles/daphnevtaylorgarcia.php; and Walter D. Mignolo and ­Catherine Walsh, eds., On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). Debates surrounding terminology and means of implementation are outlined in Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. 7 Nana Adusei-Poku’s response in Huey Copeland, Hal Foster, David Joselit, Pamela M. Lee, eds., “A Questionnaire on Decolonization,” October 174 (2020): 6. 8 Natalie Rudd, Beth Hughes, Emma Dexter, Moira Lindsay, Eliza Gluckman, Penny Johnson, Erika Tan, and Shiraz Bayjoo, “Decolonising British Art: Decentering Three Collections,” UAL (University of the Arts London) Decolonising Arts Institute in partnership with Arts Council, British Council, and Government Art Collections, November 5, 2020. The seminar recording is archived at https://www.arts.ac.uk/ual-decolonising-arts-institute/. 9 Coco Fusco, “We Need New Institutions, Not New Art,” Hyperallergic, October 26, 2020, https://hyperallergic.com/596864/ford-foundation-creative-futures-coco-fusco/. 10 Ahmad Mashadi and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, eds., Camping and Tramping through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya (Singapore: NUS Museum, 2011). 11 British Malaya refers to Malay Peninsula territories and the island of Singapore that were incorporated into the British Empire between the late eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, some of which were governed as protectorates, others of which were subject to direct rule. This followed a period of administrative control by the British East India Company, which had first established a trading post on Penang Island in 1786. 12 According to Wong Lee Min, “Halimah binte Abdullah, a sixty-year-old weaver from Johor who was ostensibly frail to begin with, sadly never made it back home. In the cold weather of May 1924, she yielded to acute pneumonia within a day of hospitalisation after being ill for seven days, and was buried in accordance with Islamic practices on land owned by the Woking Mosque, Southwest of London. Health problems also struck the supervisors of a group of basket makers from Negri Sembilan: in 1925, Penghulu Abdul Latip was hospitalized while Sheikh Ahmad underwent surgery. News on the suffering endured by these three individuals was largely suppressed, making them physical and figurative victims of the exhibition’s epistemic violence.” Wong’s account is drawn from primary archival documents: MM, 11 June 1924; Certified Copy of an Entry of Death Given at the General Register Office, Qtr J, Vol. 03a, p. 250, Halimah Vinti [sic] Abdullah; Andrew Caldecott, Report on the Malaya Pavilion, British Empire Exhibition (Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1926), 21. See Wong Lee Min, “Negotiating Colonial Identities: Malaya in the British Empire Exhibition, 1924–1925,” MA thesis, National University of Singapore, 2013, pp. 95–96. 13 Author’s e-mail correspondence with Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, October 12, 2021. Erika Tan’s conversation with the author, Zoom, February 13, 2022. All references to statements from the artist hereafter are informed by this exchange alongside sustained dialogues between Tan and the author from 2016 to 2022. 14 Gérard Genette, “Introduction to the Paratext,” New Literary History 22 (1991): 261. 15 Here Genette cites Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 45. Cited in ­Genette, “Introduction to the Paratext,” 261. 16 Conversation with the author, Zoom, February 13, 2021. 17 Due to limitations in the text-to-speech program options, Tan used Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), the standardized dialect of Malay spoken in the nation of Indonesia. What is often referred to simply as Malay (Bahasa Melayu) is spoken in Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. The two languages are mutually intelligible as they share Austronesian linguistic roots. 18 For Mladen Dolar, the human voice – let alone the mechanized voice – is already acousmatic and, therefore, uncanny, in that the voice is of the body but never directly seen as emanating from its source. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 8. 19 Andrew Brooks, “Glitch/Failure: Constructing a Queer Politics of Listening,” in “The Politics of Sound Art,” Special Issue, Leonardo Music Journal 25 (2015): 38–39.



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Pamela N. Corey 20 Mark Nunes, “Introduction. Error, Noise, and Potential: The Outside of Purpose,” Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures, ed. Mark Nunes (New York: Continuum, 2011), 3. 21 The question of agency in relation to colonized subjects’ participation in the world fairs cannot be generalized in a matter-of-fact way due to differences in class and ethnic identity among the colonized, the complexity of political relations between elite ‘native’ agents and their own instrumentalization of the colonial exhibitions, as well as class and labour struggles within the colonies and in the metropole. See Sarah Britton, “‘Come and See the Empire by the All-Red Route!’: AntiImperialism and Exhibitions in Interwar Britain,” History Workshop Journal 69 (Spring 2010): 68–89. 22 Erika Tan, APA JIKA, The Mis-Placed Comma (I, II, III), 2017, 2 channel HD video (8 min 32 sec, 7 min 18 sec, 9 min 54 sec). 23 For more on unrealised, see National Gallery Singapore, “Media Release: unrealised expands the Gallery Experience into Digital Space,” https://www.nationalgallery.sg/sites/default/files/pdf/ Media%20Release%20-%20unrealised%20by%20National%20Gallery%20Singapore.pdf, retrieved September 5, 2022. 24 Mechtild Widrich provides a compelling case study of the history of the two colonial buildings and their transformation into National Gallery Singapore in “The Naked Museum: Art, Urbanism, and Global Positioning in Singapore,” Art Journal 75, no. 2 (2016): 46–65. 25 Statement provided to the author by the artist. 26 The Cham loom served as a proxy for the original loom used in the Malaya Pavilion in Wembley in 1924, currently held in the V&A Museum collections. Both the Cham and Malayan looms were incomplete, but retained fragments of textiles-in-process, and are thus seen by Tan as documents of the weavers’ performance of labor. Statement provided to the author by the artist.

Selected Bibliography Britton, Sarah. “‘Come and See the Empire by the All-Red Route!’: Anti-Imperialism and Exhibitions in Interwar Britain.” History Workshop Journal 69 (Spring 2010): 68–89. Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Erika Tan, ed. Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You? Sila Mengkanibalkan Kami, Mahu Tak? ­Singapore: NUS [National University of Singapore] Museum, 2014. Fernandez, Maria. “Postcolonial Media Theory.” Art Journal 58, no. 3 (1999): 58–73. Fusco, Coco. “We Need New Institutions, Not New Art.” Hyperallergic, October 26, 2020, https:// hyperallergic.com/596864/ford-foundation-creative-futures-coco-fusco/. Accessed October 22, 2022. Genette, Gérard. “Introduction to the Paratext.” New Literary History 22 (1991): 261–272. Mashadi, Ahmad, and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, eds. Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya. Singapore: NUS Museum, 2011. Nunes, Mark. “Introduction. Error, Noise, and Potential: The Outside of Purpose.” In Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures, ed. Mark Nunes, 3–26. New York: Continuum, 2011. Widrich, Mechtild. “The Naked Museum: Art, Urbanism, and Global Positioning in Singapore.” Art Journal 75, no. 2 (2016): 46–65.

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27 REFLECTING ON WHITENESS IN RECENT CONTEMPORARY ARTWORK EXPLORING TRANSNATIONAL POLAND Alpesh Kantilal Patel A complaint often made by artists of color (or those considered “other”) is that their ­artwork often gets conflated with their authorship. Part of the solution to this problem is to examine contemporary art made by white artists with an eye to their own possession of ethnicity. Indeed, decolonizing art history must involve a critical engagement with whiteness given it is the unacknowledged and often invisible ground of the discipline. In the early 2000s, significant scholarship exploring “whiteness studies” in art history began to emerge. For instance, American art historian Martin A. Berger published Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (2005), and the December 2001 issue of Art Journal included a special forum exploring whiteness.1 Overall, though, there has not been any sustained attention to the topic.2 In this chapter, I argue that decolonization should make whiteness “strange” as British film and queer theorist Richard Dyer perspicaciously suggests.3 More recently, I did so by considering artworks by white artists as part of the writing of a transnational South Asian art history by mobilizing methods and frameworks that disrupted and kept in play the white/non-white and South Asian/non-South Asian binaries.4 Here, I will focus on the works of Jacek J. Kolasiński and Radek Szlaga, both of whom mobilize racial signifiers in their artistic practices but are of Polish descent. I examine their works in the broader context of the way race and ethnicity have played in shaping contemporary Poland, one of the most homogenous countries in Europe—a legacy in part of the Holocaust, continued racism in the post-1945 era, border shifts during the Soviet era, and mass deportations of non-Polish residents. Moreover, Poland was never part of the African slave trade or had any overseas colonies; and economically and culturally, the country is not a destination of interest for many contemporary non-white immigrants. More recently, Poland’s xenophobic government has further shored up its whiteness. During the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) Party’s first year in power in 2015, the new government immediately began xenophobic moves such as staunchly refusing to comply with European Union quotas for refugees primarily from Syria and other conflict areas.5 In stark contrast, the Polish government in 2019 allowed for about 400,000 Ukrainians to move and work in Poland “in what amounts to the largest migration into a European country in recent years.”6 When Russia began its assault on Ukraine in March 2022, Poland took on more refugees from 363

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Ukraine. However, there have been reports of discrimination and violence against nonwhite ­individuals.7 In other words, there is inherent racism, not just xenophobia, at play: Poland will open its borders to refugees if they do not have a darker skin color. Both the works of Szlaga and Kolasiński put into relief the historical connections of Poland to nonwhite cultures and thereby implicitly reveal the hypocrisy of the PiS party. To do so, they mobilize signifiers culturally marked as Black, but to varying levels of success. Kolasiński’s Creole Archive (2015–present) makes up the bulk of my discussion, but I begin by addressing a few paintings from Szlaga’s 2015 solo exhibition in Warsaw, Poland.

Radek Szlaga’s Exhibition All the Brutes I visited Szlaga’s exhibition of 19 paintings, all oil on canvas, at Galeria Leto in Warsaw in the fall of 2015. His work examined the novella The Heart of Darkness (1902) by Joseph Conrad. Born with the Polish name Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, he changed his name when he moved to Britain. The exhibition title All the Brutes refers to the cryptic phrase “Exterminate all the brutes!” written by Conrad’s megalomaniac character Kurtz. The Heart of Darkness has been interpreted in various ways—from a trenchant critique of colonialism to a reinscription of racist depictions of Africa—and has been invoked by the artist Christopher Wool and filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, among others. Vietnam takes the place of Africa in Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now. The Congo is widely considered to be The Heart of Darkness’s setting and Szlaga makes a connection between the Congo and Poland in his diptych Republics (Poland and Congo) (2015), which depicts the almost-identical shapes of the two countries referenced in the title. The approach is not cartographic but semi-abstract. Szlaga’s pairing might suggest loose parallels between the subjugation of Poland over the centuries and most recently by Russia and the colonization of the Congo by the French and the Belgians. Conrad’s authorship and the setting of the novella provide a link between the two nations in Republics (Poland and Congo) (2015). At the same time, it brings into relief one key difference. Poland has itself been an aggressor in the past—in particular, in its subjugation of countries such as Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. While Poland had not set up a colony in Africa or anywhere else, there were plans to do so in Madagascar.8 Szlaga’s own stake in these conversations remains opaque and as his work moves from abstraction to figuration of Black bodies, this becomes impossible to ignore. For instance, mug shots of African American males from Detroit, Michigan, in paintings such as Portraits (2015) allude to the disproportionate number of Black males who have been incarcerated in the United States. Exploring the prison industrial complex is an important subject matter, especially in relation to Detroit, which has a long history of racial tensions between Blacks and whites. Moreover, Detroit is also known for its large population of Poles. Szlaga’s parents and brother moved to Detroit when he was 19. Szlaga, however, remained in Poland, where he was born, raised, and continues to live.9 Therefore, his connection to Detroit is a tenuous one. In other words, Szlaga does not have any connection to the Black men he represents, and this turns them into one-dimensional figurations rather than subjects with an agency. In another example, the background of Demi-God Surrounded by the Elegant Brutality of His Own Choosing (2015) suggests that the racism sometimes applied to Conrad’s conflation of Africa with darkness, savagery, and unbridled sexuality has been reconstituted in today’s digital landscape. The painting depicts a desktop of a computer. In its foreground, 364

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he brings together a cacophony of images that might be those culled from the internet, such as a representation of Joseph Conrad, a faint map of Africa, body parts (such as a penis, lungs, and heart), apes and images of what appear to be Black males as well as Black women vaguely resembling Sarah Baartman. Known as the “Hottentot Venus,” ­Baartman was displayed in Europe in the nineteenth century to prove the anatomical difference between Africans and Europeans. The (white) public could poke and prod her to point out her apparently large buttocks.10 All the elements of the painting are not distinctly rendered and are diminutive in size. Moreover, Szlaga has applied paint and strips of canvas in multiple layers to the canvas, resulting in a corrugated surface that largely obscures what is being depicted. While making connections between historical and contemporary racism is a worthy topic, invoking Baartman, even if as an abstraction, is disturbing and taboo for anyone, especially for a white man. Perhaps more problematic is Cliché (2014), which portrays a well-endowed Black male sitting on an unmade bed based on a widely circulated image on the internet. In this work, there is no obscuring of the figures. The depicted man confidently meets the viewer’s gaze. Szlaga has painted a little less than half of this horizontal canvas completely in grays, to blunt the sensationalism and shock value of the image and short-circuit our voyeurism. Another work Chart (2015) incorporates apes, firearms and a stockpile of bullets with penis heads. Both Cliché and Chart bring up the simultaneous hyper-sexualization and de-­ humanization of the Black male subject, whom postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon poignantly referred to as “sealed into that crushing objecthood” and “abraded into nonbeing.”11 I have seen the image on which Cliché is based circulating on the internet, and when I first saw this work of Szlaga’s, I felt it was a biting indictment of the ongoing objectification and hyper-sexualization of the Black male body. I reported as much in my review of the exhibition in Art in America.12 However, over time I have been increasingly uncomfortable with the aesthetic choices he has made that seem to dangerously reinscribe the very representations he means to subvert. Indeed, Szlaga is playing with signifiers that have long, complicated histories, and a block of gray can hardly attend to them in a meaningful way. Therefore, I neither show the images of the works I have discussed as part of presentations nor am I publishing them as part of this chapter. In an interview in the catalog accompanying his exhibition, Szlaga says the following regarding Cliché: “Yes. That’s me in the painting.”13 This bizarre statement seems to suggest an equivalency between his authorship and his (sexually charged) Black subject matter. American Studies scholar Tomasz Basiuk, based in Warsaw, writes that “Szlaga avoids excepting himself from the possibility of harboring unexamined racist views by implicating himself in the racializing gestures which he critically portrays and by doing so in a seemingly candid, almost confessional manner.”14 However, the signifiers he mobilizes cannot be so easily controlled: intentionality and being self-ironic is not enough. What I have written thus far is not meant to be a wholesale indictment of the exhibition, given I discussed only a handful of works, but it is meant to act as a foil for the remainder of this chapter, in which I attempt to answer the following question through a deep exploration of the work of another artist of Polish descent, Jacek J. Kolasiński: under what conditions (if any) is it ever okay for a white artist to mobilize racial signifiers? To truly make whiteness “strange” per Dyer, I argue that it is important to move beyond the facile notion that white artists can never explore racialized signifiers. Such thinking is a trap because it implies only artists of color can do so, and this leads us back to the uneasy conflation of the authorship of artists of color with their work. 365

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Jacek J. Kolasiński’s The Creole Archive Based in Miami, Florida, in the United States, Kolasiński began The Creole Archive in 2015. As I will argue, this work is more successful than the ones by Szlaga discussed above in shattering any illusion of Poland as disconnected from other cultures worldwide. His archive is ever-growing, and it is not possible to treat the elements of The Creole Archive as discrete as I did the paintings in the previous section. I will instead explore a constellation of parts of the archive and its conceptual underpinnings. Before doing so, I provide important historical context in this section and how the artist began this ambitious project. The Creole Archive is inspired by his visits to “Little Haiti,” an area of Miami named for the many Haitian refugees of the 1980s who settled there. The site includes many restaurants, cultural centers, and bookstores that broadly deal with the African diaspora.15 During his visits, he would see many depictions of the Haitian Vodou spirit Ezili that resembled the doleful Black Madonna of Częstochowa – Czarna Madonna in Polish and also referred to as Our Lady of Częstochowa – a four-foot-high religious icon of the Virgin Mary with which he was familiar having grown up in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s.16 Both Ezili and the Black Madonna have darker skin and two slashes on their cheek. Their similarity is not accidental, and Kolasiński was aware of this. The transnational materialization of the Black Madonna as Ezili can be traced back to the presence of Poles in Haiti in the early nineteenth century. The movement of the Madonna from Poland to Haiti – and indeed to Miami – maps almost exactly Kolasiński’s shift from Krakow, Poland, which he left soon after Soviet rule ended, to Miami, where he has now lived more years than Poland. While the Black Madonna is based in Poland, her origin story (or stories) suggest(s) she was born out of much more expansive transregional movements. There are several stories about the origin of the Madonna. One of them indicates she had been painted by the apostle St. Luke on a table used by the Holy Family 2,000 years ago.17 Indeed, the icon was already considered miraculous when it was brought to Poland. All accounts agree that the Black Madonna was brought to Częstochowa during the fourteenth century. Around 1430, looters broke the wooden board supporting the canvas and slashed it. Medieval restorers were unaware of the encaustic method, and their attempts were unsuccessful. Several years later, the image was removed entirely and replaced with a new image of the Madonna, where one cheek bears two scars, referencing where the saber slashes of the paintings took place. Moreover, a fire in the monastery darkened her pigments that transformed the skin tone on her face to a burnt sienna color. Both the scars and skin color illustrate that she survived these calamities. The Madonna is thought to have been brought to Haiti by Poles in the early nineteenth century. In 1802, 20,000 soldiers – a quarter of whom were from the Polish Dąbrowski ­Legions – were sent by Napoleon Bonaparte to Saint-Domingue, France’s wealthiest colony, to quell a rebellion led by the general Toussaint L’Ouverture, a formerly enslaved man. A year before this, Saint-Domingue adopted a constitution that abolished slavery and declared L’Ouverture leader for life. The Polish soldiers eventually became sympathetic to the cause of the enslaved population. They saw themselves in their struggle for independence against a mighty power. In 1797, Habsburg, Austria, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the R ­ ussian Empire signed a treaty effectively dissolving the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Poles had allied themselves with the French in the hopes that they would help them win back their independence.18 When the rebels won the revolution in 1804, Saint-Domingue became officially renamed Haiti, the island’s original Taino name (Ayiti in Creole). The country’s first 366

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president Jean-Jacques Dessalines has famously said that the Polish were the “white negroes of Europe,” given that Poles and Haitians shared similar stories of oppression and rootlessness.19 Dessalines guaranteed citizenship to any Pole who wanted it. Many of the original contingents of Polish soldiers had succumbed to yellow fever or died in battle. Still, about 400 of the survivors remained in the community now known as La Pologne. As the Poles settled down, their traditions began to meld with local ones. They resulted in the famous Polish icon of the Virgin Mary becoming a syncretic goddess in the Caribbean. In Haiti and its diasporas, the Black Madonna with the two tell-tale scars on her face and darker skin is the Ezili Danto.20 While the day-to-day practices of Vodou are attended to by women, few of the religion’s spirit forces, or Lwas, are feminine spirits: Ezili is an exception. She represents love, sexuality, prosperity, pleasure, maternity, creativity, and fertility forces.21 Queer, feminist, and Black studies scholar Omise’eke Tinsley notes that Danto “transform[s] what it means to be a woman in the first place.”22 Moreover, madivin and masisi, or transmasculine and transfeminine Haitians, are often under Ezili Danto’s patronage.23 Catholic and Protestant spiritual communities do not welcome gender and sexually nonconforming subjects. It is not surprising that they are attracted to Ezili and the Vodou religion.24 Tinsley provocatively suggests that Vodou has a queer present and arguably a queer past.25 In fact, the Haitian revolution, in some accounts, began with the appearance of Elizi Danto at a Vodou ceremony at Bwa Kayiman on August 14, 1791.26

Multiple Madonnas: 3D-Printed Sculptures Kolasiński’s The Creole Archive does the vital work of making a queer and – as the title suggests – “creolizing” connection among disparate regions and, in this way, does not think about the nation as a kind of singular root but one that per Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant is “reaching out to meet other roots.”27 Creolization refers to the process of cultural mixings in the Caribbean and is a result of slavery, plantation culture, and colonialism. Cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall has written that while hybridity often assumes the components that created it can be segregated, creolization suggests that the components are not identifiable given the ongoing flux associated with entanglement.28 Importantly, Glissant believed that creolization could be applicable not only in the Caribbean but also across “all the world” (Tout-monde). That is, Kolasinski’s work suggests that by only focusing on the Caribbean as bound, it is likely that the connections between Poland and Haiti becomes less visible as does those to south Florida. Glissant’s ideas of creolization are more porous. Is it possible to consider Glissant’s thinking to geographies that have no connection to the Caribbean? How elastic one can be with Glissant’s thinking is beyond the scope of this paper but one that deserves further consideration.29 Not surprisingly, Kolasiński’s archive is not meant to build fixed knowledge or truths. This idea is materialized in his archive in the serial production of 3D-printed Black Madonnas (see Figure 27.1). There are two basic types: one based on a carving he commissioned from a Poland-based artisan and figures from botanicas in Miami. Each one is different – the glitches typical of printers here are not seen as errors or as unwelcome. Kolasiński creates a mise-en-abyme through his production of multiple 3D-printed sculptures of the Black Madonna that range from being small enough to hold in one’s palms to about two feet. The sculptures are hand-painted, often with patterning, a hybrid of traditional Polish folkloric clothing and Haitian Vodou flags. Some are painted by his partner, father-in-law, and nieces: 367

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Figure 27.1  Jacek J. Kolasiński, VN A002 (2018), mixed media, 30 × 20 cm. Courtesy of artist.

they are all genealogically connected to Haiti. The sculptures exemplify the seemingly interminable subjectivities through which Ezili queers fixed categorical meaning. Tinsley, too, suggests as much when she refers to Ezili variously as “manly black superwoman,” “beautiful femme queen, bull dyke, weeping willow, [and] dagger mistress,” among other names.30 Most of the sculptures are painted with bright hues. One is entirely gilded in gold except for the face painted over in black; in fact, many of the Madonnas’ faces are obscured. These abstractions allow Ezili to retain their right to what Glissant would characterize as “opacity.”31 Glissant deploys this concept in relation to the postcolonial subject, who should not be appropriated by discourses of power that originate elsewhere. He further notes that opacity is “the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence.”32 One Madonna sculpture is completely unpainted, revealing the raw plastic out of which all the figures are constructed. In this case, the plastic is a bright, mandarin orange color, and the many threads, which would typically be shaved off, are left intact here. Along with the other sculptures, this unfinished quality further cements that Ezili is always in (trans) formation. Worth noting is that the plastic Kolasiński utilizes to print his Madonnas is made of sugar and corn and, in this way, obliquely references Haitian plantation culture. Haiti was France’s wealthiest colony because of its sugar production. The physical process of printing his sculptures requires an incredible amount of heat – the plastic melts at roughly twice the temperature to boil water – and recalls the dangerous process of sugar refinement. In 1894, The Illustrated American magazine described the process as “very wild and terrible, like a caged cyclone” and morbidly notes that a worker had only one hope of 368

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Figure 27.2  Jacek J. Kolasiński, The Creole Archive (2015–) selection of archival artefacts, mixed media, watercolor paper: 20 × 13 cm and 25 × 18 cm. Courtesy of artist.

escaping “perpetual torture”: death.33 The tireless work of the island’s enslaved Indigenous population, the voices of which were silenced, is a manifestation of the hard-working yet muted Ezili Danto.

Archival Artefacts The Black Madonna sculptures are part of a larger archive, the concerns of which overlap with and are co-extensive with Ezili Danto’s affinity for queer and gendered sexualities. The archive includes approximately 500 (as of the writing of this chapter) of what Kolasiński refers to as “archival artefacts” that collectively interlace Eastern European, North American, and African histories (see Figure 27.2). One cultural or historical artefact is affixed per sheet of watercolor paper, including several basic formal organizing elements. First, at the top of the sheet, Kolasiński incorporates the artefact: religious prayer cards, postcards, Polaroids of film stills, personal photographs and drawings, and screenshots of Instagram feeds. Toward the bottom, “EZILI DANTOR PROJECTS Creole Archive Special Collections” and a representation of Madonna’s head – around which is written the words “Creole,” “Black,” and “Madonna” in Luminari font – are typically stamped in red. The stamping metaphorically legitimizes the ephemera he assembles. However, these archival elements are not meant to consolidate an official historical archive. Moreover, there is no hierarchy: the artefacts can be put together in seemingly endless configurations. 369

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Poland is invoked in various ways. For instance, artefacts referencing the Black ­Madonna of Częstochowa include postcards, religious prayer cards, and a Polaroid of a screenshot from a documentary of a 1960s procession of the Black Madonna in honor of 1,000 years of Christianity. Included are various medallions and pins, including one Kolasiński’s stepfather wore in the solidarity movement in the 1980s. The inclusion of personal ephemera such as this helps to prevent his archive from taking on a presence of objective truth. Other artefacts reference Haiti and – sometimes obliquely – Poles in Haiti. For example, Kolasiński includes black-and-white Polaroids of stills captured by iPhone of the film The Ashes (Popioły), 1965, directed by Andrzej Wajda and based on the eponymously titled book (1904) by Stefan Żeromski. The film does not reference Haiti directly, but it portrays the Polish Legions, a cadre eventually sent to Haiti, as particularly violent and excessive in their use of force. Kolasiński’s use of Polaroid blurs the stills as if to question the official history, given the depictions of the soldiers are in contradistinction to how the Haitians portray the Legions. The archive includes representations of various individuals connected to the Haitian revolution, such as L’Ouverture, who rose through the ranks to lead the rebellion; the first president Jean-Jacques Dessalines; an unnamed Polish foot soldier; and Napoleon. Miami and Little Haiti are invoked in artefacts incorporating several Catholic postcards depicting Ezili Danto and other deities found in botanicas for purchase. Kolasiński has included a black-and-white Polaroid of the Archbishop of Miami, who was known to be deeply involved in the contemporary Haitian community. Kolasiński also includes several Polaroid prints depicting the effect of gentrification on Little Haiti, the eventual decline of the botanicas, and the destruction of murals of Ezili Danto and Haitian heroes. He attended Vodou religious ceremonies at the Little Haiti Cultural Center. He includes several inkjet and Polaroid prints of images of the religious ceremonies taken with a digital camera. He was careful to only provide images in his archive of rituals, which were open to the public. He had been invited to private ceremonies, but he never took photographs there. It is instructive to consider the images of religious ceremonies alongside the Polaroid prints of images he took of film stills of experimental filmmaker Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1954), an unfinished black-and-white documentary film about dance and possession in Haitian Vodou.34 The Polaroid prints produce abstracted images of the rituals. Deren became personally involved with the subjects she documented, allowing her access to traditions she otherwise might not have had. While this is what made her work so crucial since there had been nothing like it in the English language, it also was ethically dubious. Kolasiński’s abstractions of the stills avoid any semblance of impropriety. He incorporates Louisiana into the histories he is weaving together as part of The Creole Archive. For instance, two artefacts include inkjet prints of photographs of the slave quarters and various buildings of the Whitney Plantation Museum, located in Wallace, Louisiana – about a 45-minute drive from New Orleans.35 This is the only museum in all of Louisiana focusing on the lives of enslaved people. During the early nineteenth century, amid the Haitian revolution, many whites and free people of color from Saint Domingue arrived with their slaves in Louisiana. The population of New Orleans doubled as a result. By incorporating this museum into the archive, Kolasiński acknowledges the forced movement of enslaved people to places outside of Haiti. These archival elements gesture toward the complex transregional histories unfolding from slavery. From another angle, Kolasiński incorporates images of the Fon people of present-day Benin, who were enslaved, and others from West Africa and brought to Haiti (among other places). The Fon are known to have brought their Vodou practices with them. The Kreyòl 370

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word “Vodou” is transculturated from the Fon Kingdom, where sacred energies were called “Vodun.”36 The Fon Kingdom is evoked by a few of Kolaśinski’s sculptures, specifically those bringing together the Polish and Haitian Madonnas. They are tied together in a fashion like that found in bocio objects of the Fon. As art historian Suzanne Preston Blier writes, these objects were not merely reflections of pain and anguish connected to state-issued slavery but served as a means of readdressing wrongs and dissipating attendant anxiety.37 Kolasiński has applied a liquid rubber that transforms some of his sculptures into a nonreflective, charcoal-like gray black. In August 2021, Kolasiński received a grant to visit the Getty Research Institute, containing over 2,000 colonial postcards and primary materials. It allowed him to examine a cross-section of the visual culture of the colonial conquest in Africa. While there, Kolasiński came across several racist postcards depicting prepubescent African girls. While not surprising, it gave him pause, as he said in an interview I had with the artist.38 On the one hand, they seem necessary to be part of the archive to avoid erasing history; on the other, depicting them would reinscribe the perverse sexual objectification. In the end, he has provisionally decided against the display of these postcards.

Archive as Methodology and as Archipelagic Thinking I have written elsewhere about the work of other artists, such as Tina Takemoto and Jannus Samma, who explore absences in archives as a methodology.39 For both these artists, the works are about their yearnings for a connection to historical figures, whose archives are incomplete or problematic. They implicitly demand we move beyond the disembodied conceptualization of the archive as presumptively “impossible,” as theorized by Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever (1995).40 There is a similar yearning and activist impulse in Kolasiński’s artwork in his growing collection of archival artefacts. The key difference, of course, is that his authorship does not exactly mirror the content of his artwork. I would argue, though, that his investigation of the Madonna is an organic non-linear – indeed creolizing – u ­ nfurling of his exploration of his transnational genealogy that has resulted in the materialization of Polish identity as connected to North America (the United States and the Caribbean) and parts of Africa. Of course, these transregional entanglements are ones the contemporary Polish government might want to pretend do not exist. In contradistinction, Glissant, in his discussion of creolization, applies what he refers to as “archipelagic thinking” to the world, which is “becoming an archipelago.”41 Glissant believed creolization and the archipelago went hand in hand. The archipelago, a chain or series of islands scattered in a body of water with no clear center, of interest to him was the idea that each island of the Caribbean maintains its autonomy while still being a part of the whole. Kolasinski enacts archipelagic thinking as artistic praxis where the multiplicity of artefacts, each distinct and whole, in his Creole Archive simultaneously coheres into a transregional singularity. As the archive continues to grow, Kolasiński has plans for it to become the source of several exhibitions. I will share one of the artist’s initial experiments in February 2020 to conclude. He projected the colorful Miami murals of Ezili onto various buildings of the manor estate that are part of the Center for Polish Sculpture, part of the park and palace complex in the small village of Orońsko. The projections point to a double absence: the invisibility of queer Ezili in Poland and the destruction of the mural in Little Haiti in Miami – a casualty of gentrification. And yet, the buildings glow with such presence and intensity in the pitchdark winter evening of this rural area of Poland that they function more as poetic gestures with profound implications for what constitutes Polish identity. 371

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Notes 1 Martin A. Berger, Sight Unseen Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); John P. Bowles, “Forum: Blinded by the White: Art and History at the Limits of Whiteness,” Art Journal 60, no. 4 (December 2001): 38–43; Adrian Margaret Smith Piper, “Whiteless,” Art Journal 60, no. 4 (December 2001): 62–65; Ellen Fernandez-Sacco, “Check Your Baggage: Resisting Whiteness in Art History,” Art Journal 60, no. 4 (December 2001): 58–61; Olu Oguibe, “Whiteness and ‘The Canon,’” Art Journal 60, no. 4 (December 2001): 44–47; and Maurice Berger, “Picturing Whiteness: Nikki S. Lee’s Yuppie Project,” Art Journal 60, no. 4 (December 2001): 54–57. 2 James Denison organized a panel “U.S. Art and Critical Whiteness Studies: Looking Back, Looking Forward” for the 2023 College Art Association’s (CAA) annual conference that begins to address this issue. 3 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1997), 4. 4 Non-South Asian artists such as Cy Twombly, Mario Pfeiffer, Stephan Dean, and others I envelop into my writing of a transnational South Asian art histories: Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 5 Harvey Gavin, “‘We Will Decide Who Enters Our Countries!’ Hungary and Poland REJECT EU Refugee Quotas”’, Express.Co.Uk, 15 May 2018, https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/960125/ eu-news-hungary-poland-oppose-european-union-refugee-quota-Viktor-Orban-Morawiecki. 6 See Shaun Walker, “‘A Whole Generation Has Gone’: Ukrainians Seek Better Life in Poland,” The Guardian, 18 April 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/18/ whole-generation-has-gone-ukrainian-seek-better-life-poland-elect-president. 7 “People of Colour Fleeing Ukraine Attacked by Polish Nationalists,” The Guardian, 2 March 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/mar/02/people-of-colourfleeing-ukraine-attacked-by-polish-nationalists. 8 See R. Van Den Boogaerde Pierre, The Madagascar Project (Houston, TX: Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency (SBPRA), 2013). 9 Harlan Levey and Radek Szlaga, “Harlan Levey in Conversation with Radek Szlaga,” in Radek Szlaga: All the Brutes, edited by Magdalena Komornicka (Warsaw, Poland: Fontarte, 2015), 32–33. 10 Szlaga’s painting Woman (2015), which was not in the exhibition, is a profile image of a woman who could be Baartmann. 11 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, Evergreen Black Cat Book (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 109. 12 Alpesh Kantilal Patel, “Radek Szlaga at Leto Gallery, Poland,” Art in America 104, no. 2 (February 2017):108. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/radek-szlaga/. 13 Levey and Szlaga, 36. 14 Tomasz Basiuk, “Five Contemporary Polish Artists Engaging with Race.” Art and Race in Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, special issue of Art Margins Online, January 20, 2021, https://artmargins.com/five-contemporary-polish-artists-engaging-with-race/. 15 https://www.miamiandbeaches.com/neighborhoods/little-haiti 16 Interview with Jacek J. Kolasiński, date June 2021. Ezili is also referred to as Erzulie and Erzuli. Ezili, though, is the most common spelling in Kreyòl. 17 Details of history in this and the next paragraph culled from the following sources: No author, “The Black Madonna of Czestochowa: Poland’s Most Revered Icon,” Polish American Journal, April 5, 2019, https://www.polamjournal.com/Library/APHistory/blackmadonna/blackmadonna. html; Drusilla Menaker, “Poland’s Black Madonna,” New York Times, July 22, 1990, https:// www.nytimes.com/1990/07/22/travel/poland-s-black-madonna.html 18 Details culled from the excellent summary of Poles’ presence in Haiti by Pawel Argan, “Polish Patriots Once Fought Alongside Rebelling Slaves. Where is that Solidarity Today?” Newsweek, April 1, 2019, https://www.newsweek.com/poland-nationalism-new-york-haiti-slave-rebellionrevolution-1382388 19 As quoted in Pawel Argan, “Polish Patriots Once Fought Alongside Rebelling Slaves. Where is that Solidarity Today?” Newsweek, April 1, 2019, https://www.newsweek.com/poland-nationalismnew-york-haiti-slave-rebellion-revolution-1382388

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Reflecting on Whiteness in Recent Contemporary Artwork 20 Lwa comes from Yoruba meaning “spirit master.” Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 16. 21 Tinsley, 4. 22 Tinsley, 72. 23 Tinsley, 4. 24 Tinsley, 9. 25 Tinsley, 10. 26 Tinsley, 10–11. 27 Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du Duvers (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 23. 28 Hall, 31. 29 I consider this more explicitly in my book Multiple and One: Writing Queer Global Art histories (forthcoming from Manchester: Manchester University Press). 30 Tinsley, 4. 31 See “For Opacity” in Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 189–195. 32 Glissant, 191. 33 As quoted in David W. Dunlap, “Relics of the Domino Sugar Refinery, Frozen in Time and Syrup,” New York Times, October 23, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/nyregion/sticky-relicsof-the-domino-sugar-refinery.html. The Illustrated American magazine, founded in 1890 and ran approximately for a decade, was a weekly periodical. In 1892, the circulation was at its peak of 40,000. 34 Though the film was not completed she did publish a book Divine Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti (1953). 35 https://www.whitneyplantation.org/history/slavery-in-louisiana/ 36 Tinsley, 9. 37 Suzanne Preston Blier, “Vodun Art, Social History and the Slave Trade,” in Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoef (London: Routledge, 1998), 323–328. 38 Interview with Kolasiński, June 2021. 39 Alpesh Kantilal Patel, “Artistic Responses to Gaps in LGBTQI Archives: From World War II Asian America to Soviet Estonia,” in Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present, coedited by Beáta Hock and Anu Allas, 37–60 (London: Routledge, June 2018). 40 See also Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and Diana Taylor. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 41 Édouard Glissant. Traité Du Toute-Monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 193–194. See also my article, “Queer Chinese feminist Archipelago: Shanghai, San Francisco, and Miami,” philoSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism. 11:1 (December 2021): 194–212.

Selected Bibliography Berger, Martin A. Sight Unseen Whiteness and American Visual Culture. Berkeley: University of ­California Press, 2005. Blier, Suzanne Preston. “Vodun Art, Social History and the Slave Trade.” In Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoef, 323–328. London: Routledge, 1998. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture. London; New York: Routledge, 1997. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. Levey, Harlan and Radek Szlaga. Radek Szlaga: All the Brutes, Edited by Komornicka, Magdalena. Warsaw, Poland: Fontarte, 2015. Omise’eke, Natasha Tinsley. Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders. Durham: Duke ­University Press, 2018. Patel, Alpesh Kantilal. “Artistic Responses to Gaps in LGBTQI Archives: From World War II Asian America to Soviet Estonia.” In Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present, coedited by Beáta Hock and Anu Allas, 37–60. London: Routledge, June 2018. Patel, Alpesh Kantilal. Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017.

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28 RACIALIZATION, CREOLIZATION, AND MINOR TRANSNATIONALISM Black and Indigenous Exchange in Spanish Colonial Visual Culture Elena FitzPatrick Sifford Much of Afro-diasporic art history relating to Latin America has focused on Black majority regions of Brazil and the circum-Caribbean, while comparatively less attention has been paid to areas that nonetheless had substantial Black populations.1 In the viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru, for example, examinations of visual constructions of race have focused on the Indigenous and Spanish binary while the visuality of Africans and Afro-descendants in these important centers of Spanish Viceregal artistic production have received comparatively less coverage. Moving towards an art history that abandons Eurocentrism and embraces racial justice, one crucial step calls for an examination of the representations of people of African descent within multiracial colonial circumstances. The visual arts were a powerful tool in rendering and reifying racial hierarchies that within Latin America, as opposed to the “Old World,” were impacted by a triangulation of identities: Spanish, Indigenous, and African. Early modern constructions of Blackness shifted with the expanding Spanish empire, which saw the development of new views on race, power, and representation. Thereby, the ways that Black people were represented functioned in tandem with ideas of alterity developed alongside different but related notions of the otherness of Indigenous peoples. Alternate readings emerge through probing interactions between Black and Indigenous racialized groups. By doing so we begin the work of decentering the white gaze, thereby approaching the colonial era from a perspective grounded in decolonial thought. Francoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih aptly describe interactions between non-dominant groups in their 2005 volume Minor Transnationalism: More often than not, minority subjects identify themselves in opposition to a dominant discourse rather than vis-à-vis each other and other minority groups. We study the center and the margin but rarely examine the relationships among different margins. The dominant is posited, even by those who resist it, as a powerful and universalizing force that either erases or eventually absorbs cultural particularities.2 DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-33 374

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What if we, as art historians, could work to examine the “different margins” and their interactions while acknowledging the power of the center but finding ways to destabilize it? Looking at interactions between “different margins” is one step that can nuance our understandings of constructions of otherness. In so doing we sidestep a singular Spanishdominant canon. Rather than inserting new artists or art works into said canon, thinking of constructions of race along Black and Indigenous axes offers new ways of thinking through Early Modern race and visuality. Constructions of race are a by-product of colonization and empire. Yet, when we examine early modern images of racialized people, they take on varying forms and functions that exist beyond the scope of the colonizer. Martinican poet philosopher Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of relation argues for a way of recognizing a multiplicity of cultural influences to approach a creolized vision of the Antilles. Afterall, while the power dynamics were relatively fixed, individual experiences of conquest and colonization were ever multifaceted. Rather than a monolithic “Spanish” and “Indigenous” encounter, the ethnic origins of the conquistadors were varied. Similarly, the Indigenous peoples they encountered were multiethnic and multilinguistic with their own alliances and cultural particularities. As Glissant aptly describes in Poetics of Relation: I maintain that right from the first shock of conquest, this movement contained the embryo (no matter how deferred its realization might have seemed) that would transcend the duality that started it. Let us, then, press on past this duality.3 Following Glissant, historian David Buissert proposes the term “creolization” to accommodate the three groups involved in the colonial encounter without privileging one culture over another.4 Traditionally used to describe either Europeans or Africans born in the Americas, turning the noun creole into the verb creolization creates space for thinking through hybridity and syncretism as processes that were part and parcel of colonial lifeways. Throughout the Spanish Viceroyalties Afro-descendants and Indigenous people were in frequent contact despite laws as well as social taboos that aimed to separate the groups. Studying visual culture provides a lens into these Black and Indigenous interactions, thus skirting a Spanish-dominated narrative. By looking to visual examples of such minor transnationalisms, we gain access to a more nuanced view of the development of concepts of race in the Spanish Viceroyalties.

African Indigenous Interactions and Spanish Record Keeping Viceregal New Spain had various legal and social statutes that purported to divide based on racial lines. While these divisions were in place in name, more recent scholarship has increasingly questioned their effectiveness. Historian Matthew Restall describes how while the lived conditions on the ground were mutable, the history handed down to us shows bias in record keeping: The fact that both blacks and natives occupied subordinate positions within the Spanish power structure discouraged specific references to peaceful interactions between members of both groups in public records. Documentation of harmonious interactions between blacks and natives might create positive popular attitudes toward black native solidarity, which could pose a threat to minority white authority … Spanish 375

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attitude and social designs probably played a large role in dictating a historical record that perpetuated a myth of general hostility between blacks and indigenous people.5 Yet, as early as 1503, Black maroon communities were established in Hispaniola who fought against Spaniards with the aid of Indigenous allies.6 In 1537 Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza wrote a letter to King Charles V writing of a plot organized by Blacks aligned with Indigenous conspirators, led by a Black “king” to overthrow Spanish rule. In his reaction to the news leaked by a Black informant, Mendoza orders investigations “among the Indians” in order to test the claim. He goes on to describe apprehending the Black organizers who were then killed by Indigenous allies of the Spaniards. Clearly here the colonists are using divide and conquer tactics to sow seeds of mistrust. Pitting Blacks and Indigenous people against each other served not only to bolster Spanish hegemony, but it also reified racialized divisions. Africans and their descendants were categorized as part of the República de Españoles and were thought to be con razón, versus the Indigenous people who were part of the República de Indios and were seen as sin razón. Africans could, therefore, be subject to the Inquisition while Indigenous people could not. They were seen as tabulae raza, able to fully absorb the Christian doctrine while Africans were considered to be tainted with the stain of Islam and thereby more prone to heresy and violence. The moralization that went along with racialization cast both Africans and Indigenous people as separate from the Spanish body politic, thereby enacting white supremacy by moralizing whiteness. This cast white Spaniards as the norm while othering Indigenous people and Africans. These structures of racialized thinking are manifested in varying forms of hypervisibility and erasure. The written record reveals the negative stereotypes and anxieties around race mixing and alliance building that lead to erasure of lived experiences in a Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race colonial periphery. The visual record can add nuance and augment our understanding of these creolized interactions.

Beyond the Written Record: Black and Indigenous Visuality in Spanish Colonial Art By training our eye beyond the binary, colonial art historians can begin to unearth more examples that challenge the dominant narrative of a creole-Spanish center and Black/Indigenous periphery, and that move beyond a purely mestizo (Spanish and indigenous) version of hybridity. The case of the Black conquistador here proves fruitful. Africans arrived on American shores as part of the earliest Spanish imperial missions, some enslaved and other as freemen. Spanish accounts of the conquest, however, rarely make mention of Black conquistadors. Of the major Spanish accounts only one by Francisco López de Gómara mentions the presence of Africans. Even in his account the Black conquistador is mentioned only to blame for introducing smallpox and measles to his retinue.7 The Spanish pictorial accounts feature similar omissions: the Black conquistador is absent and the focus is on the glory of the authors and key (white) Spanish players, highlighting a Spanish/Indigenous binary. It is a view that privileges the glory of the “pure blooded” Spaniard over the Indio. It is only when we look to the early colonial manuscripts created by Indigenous artists that we see the noted presence of Africans in the early contact period. The Codex Durán and Codex Azcatitlan both prominently feature Africans who likely spent time in Spain before their arrival in Mexico.8 Their presence, I have argued elsewhere, 376

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was notable to the tlacuiloque (Indigenous artist-scribes) due to preconquest associations with the divine power of blackness.9 Later Spanish or creole images of the conquest conspicuously omit the presences of Africans, but in these key manuscripts, the Indigenous artists took special note. The recording of ethnic difference was nothing new to Central Mexican visual culture. Mesoamerican artists had used markers such as dress and material culture to convey difference since at least the Classic period (c. AD 150–650). Following the Spanish conquest and the development of a new multiracial society, the tlacuilo was tasked with synthesizing the new arrivals into their visual tradition, now newly inflected with Spanish ways of seeing. The recording of the newly arrived foreigners proved to be a point of ethnogenesis. Indigenous life ways were irrevocably altered by the conquest, but the multiethnic Spaniards were also forever changed. Within this “New World,” a multitude of African, Spanish, and Indigenous ethnic groups were newly in contact, and the resulting mixed race, multiethnic, and multiracial society began to form.10 With this cataclysmic shift, it was Indigenous artists who first captured the likenesses of Africans in the Americas. We, therefore, have to look to the margins, skirting the center, in order to glean a more complete account of the contact period. Another interesting example of this is seen in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, created around 1537 by a Central Mexican tlacuilo. Folio 45 recto shows a hanged Black man who was involved in a plot also described in the letter (mentioned above) from the Viceroy Mendoza as a plot between negros and indios. Again here we can see Black and Indigenous interaction. The pre-Hispanic style glyphs alongside the hanged man indicate the discord of the time, including a comet and earthquake, both considered bad omens. Considered with the contemporaneous letter detailing Black and Indigenous collusion, we might see the tlacuilo’s work here to indicate the presence of alliance or cooperation between the Black and Indigenous peoples separate from Spanish interventions. Thus, a sixteenth-century “minor transnationalism” visualized. Moving from New Spain to the Viceroyalty of Peru, African Indigenous creolization is seen in the earliest signed portrait in South America, The Gentlemen of Esmeraldas (1599). It was painted by Andrés Sanchez Galque, a native Quiteño who belonged to the Confraternity of the Rosary, a Dominican lay brotherhood that sought to bring together Indigenous people, Africans and Spaniards.11 The portrait depicts the proud leaders of Esmeraldas, a coastal community of Afro-Indigenous maroons led by one Don Francisco de Arobe (see Figure 28.1). In the painting, Don Francisco stands proudly flanked by his two sons Don Pedro and Don Domingo. Commissioned by a Spanish judge in Quito as a gift for King Philip III, it was painted by an Indigenous artist and depicts Afro-Indigenous sitters. Their costumes combine Indigenous, African, and European styles including golden earrings, pectorals, lip plugs, earrings, necklaces made of bone and shell, European lace collars, and African spears.12 While in the letter to Philip III that accompanied the painting, the judge, Sepúlveda, describes the men as barbarians, Sánchez Galque imbues the men with a sense of self-possession and dignity, perhaps, as art historian Tom Cummins has noted, a nod to his admiration of their autonomy from the Spanish society in which he, an Indigenous man, was subsumed. Sánchez Galque’s portrait is fascinating for its triangulation of viewpoints: Spanish patron, Quechua artist, Afro-Indigenous subject. Again, here the written and visual records do not align, thus exemplifying the ways that visual culture provides a more nuanced view of Spanish American creolization. To provide another example of undoubtably many more to be uncovered in future research, Indigenous and Black interaction is both documented and visualized in an important early 377

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Figure 28.1  Andrés Sánchez Galque, The Gentleman of Esmeraldas, 1599. Image in the Public Domain. Creative Commons License: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

seventeenth-century Andean manuscript, El premir nueva corónica y buen gobierno (The first new chronical and good government), penned by Indigenous nobleman Felipe G ­ uaman Poma de Ayala in 1615. In a letter of complaint to the Spanish king, Philip III, Guaman Poma writes of the abuse and exploitation inflicted on the native population at the hands of the Spanish corregidores. Of particular interest related to the issue of Black-native exchange is his Chapter 25 “On Black Africans.”13 Drawing 275 entitled Black Christian Man and Woman who come from Black Bozales from Guinea depicts a couple kneeling before an image of the Virgin Mary with rosaries in hand. Bozales were Africans directly from the continent, who Guaman Poma views as faithful Christians obedient to their Spanish masters. In a later image, drawing 276: Good blacks endure the abuse of their master with patience and the love of Christ, he shows the same couple beaten by their Spanish owners. His message is that despite the bozal African’s adoption of the Christian faith, the Spanish slave masters treat them cruelly, thus indicating the amorality of the Spaniards. He goes on to describe the creole Blacks as, in contrast to the bozales, “bachelors, rebellious, thieves, pickpockets, robbers, tricksters, drunks, tobacco users, cheaters, low lives; pure scoundrels who often murder their own masters.”14 In drawing 277: How the black creoles steal money from their owners and give it to the Indian prostitutes, Guaman Poma depicts the negro criollo as lascivious and disrupting the colonial order by fornicating with an Indigenous woman. He also points out in the text that the resulting mixed-race offspring threatened the prevailing hierarchies. Overall, Guaman Poma uses the Africans as a pawn in his moralizing damnation of the Spanish system of governance. He argues that African bozales are morally superior precisely because they were not entirely Hispanized (though clearly Christianized), and that once they become ladinos (Hispanized Blacks), defiled Spanish influence causes them to behave immorally. Guaman Poma writes with native liberation in mind, hoping for a realignment of Viceregal power allowing for local Indigenous leadership under the Spanish crown. In this case, the minor transnational exchange serves to circumvent Spanish colonial power structures. 378

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Black and Indigenous Racialization Spaniards were anxious about interracial marriages and miscegenation. A 1606 letter by Mercedarian Fray Hincapié in the province of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, reads in part: The Indians sleep with the mulattas and the mulattos sleep with the Indian women, and for this reason all those who are born are mulattos and so in a few years there will be no Indians just mulattos such that even the devil won’t know what to do with them.15 Here the friar expresses Spanish anxiety about the loss of racial order in the Viceroyalty. Similarly, in New Spain, a 1563 royal decree prohibited Spaniards, Blacks, and mixed-race individuals from living in Indigenous villages, while in Mexico City Indios were corralled into segregated neighborhoods.16 The union of Black and Indigenous populations threatened Spanish power not only by uniting large swathes of the population, but also due to the principle of the free womb. Black men could ensure the freedom of their offspring by marrying or otherwise reproducing with Indigenous women.17 New Spanish Viceroy Martín Enríquez de Almansa (1568–1580) was particularly concerned with the threat of Black-Indigenous alliances, proposing a decree that the progeny of African-Indigenous unions should remain enslaved, regardless of the status of the mother. Although unsuccessful in his petition to the pope, other methods were developed to curtail Black-Indigenous union. For example, enslaved Africans who were accused of taking advantage of Indigenous women were punished with 100 public lashes. A second offense could result in their ears being cut off and freed men sent into exile.18 Mixed Black and Indigenous offspring came to be known by several names: mulato, zambaigo (or zambo), or pardo. Mulato was widely used beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, and derived from the word “mule,” an animal that is mixed breed of a horse and donkey and is sterile, thus relating to zoological language used to describe the cross-­breeding of animals.19 At times mulato could be used to describe either Black/white or Black/­ Indigenous relations. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, the term “zambaigo,” though rarely used in official documents, emerged to classify Black/Indigenous admixture.20 Pardo, like mulato’s early usage, could be used to describe either Black/white or Back/Indigenous individuals, and at times triracial peoples. These terms are just a few examples of many colloquialisms used to describe racial mixture throughout the Iberian American world. Many of the terminologies used in casta paintings were not used in legal documents and amount to popular jargon. The sistema de castas was in no way a fixed system, and in fact people commonly traversed the racial lines, changing their ethnic identifiers through social passing and at times even legal procedures. Eighteenth-century New Spanish casta paintings created in sets of 16 feature couples and their mixed-race offspring. The first five paintings in each set generally feature Spanish and Indigenous or Black unions followed by paintings featuring Black and Indigenous couples and their offspring. The related written inscriptions then become de-standardized across sets, exemplifying the variations in terminologies used to describe people with both Black and Indigenous blood. In Miguel Cabrera’s famed 1763 casta set, for example, the first Black-Indian union appears in painting number nine, De Negro y d’India, China cambuja. In Andrés de las Islas’ 1774 set, however, the first such pairing is in painting number eight, De Indio y Negra, nace Lobo. These two paintings are particularly helpful to compare 379

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because they reverse the racial and gendered pairing. In Cabrera’s painting, the couple consists of a Black man and Indigenous woman while in de Isla’s version of the same racial mixture, the wife is Black and the husband Indigenous. Overall, the Islas set tends to emphasize race and socio-economic stratification.21 Painting eight is the first in the series to feature a Black-Indigenous couple (all of the earlier paintings have at least one white spouse). The couples’ lower economic status is indicated by the contrast between the fine clothing in the earlier paintings and the comparatively simpler and more peasant-like dress of the indio and negra. Rather than the tri-cornered hat or powdered wig of the men in the earlier paintings, the indio wears a floppy hat—it looks like something worn in the fields, or during a hard day at work in the marketplace. Their child, the so-called lobo (literally wolf), is also the first in the set shown barefoot. Keeping in mind the policy of the free womb, considering that the mother in this pair is the Black parent, it is possible that both child and mother are enslaved. Even if they are both free, the artist uses this couple as the first example within the set to signal the downfall of the socio-racial hierarchy. The family in Cabrera’s number nine, De Negro y d’India, China cambuja, appears in contrast more solidly middle class. The figures’ clothes are unblemished and the wife wears a fine necklace. For the Black male, marrying the Indigenous woman would ensure his children were free, not only legally, but metaphorically removed from, or at least lessened their associations with enslavement. It is not until Cabrera’s painting 11, De lobo y india, albarazado, that we begin to see the clear markers of the lower class with tattered clothing and a thatched roof hut in the background. The sistema de castas and their related renderings in paint highlight the ways that race and related hierarchies were conceptualized in New Spain. Despite both written and painted recording, the categorization of which was related to Enlightenment interests, on the ground these racial groups were never fixed. Members of the (non-white) castas can and did manipulate their social standing based on any myriad of factors including phenotype, economic status, and reputational advantages. The paintings themselves privilege a Spanish or creole viewpoint. Looking at images of Black-Indigenous miscegenation in the casta paintings provides us an additional lens into the ways that Black-Indigenous interaction threatened the Spanish imperial project.

Archival Loss and Modern Reconstruction As described above, African and Indigenous interaction was historically downplayed and even purposefully suppressed. Such solidarity especially threatened Spanish colonial power, the lingering modern-day resonances of which art historian Jennifer Baez aptly describes as “the tragedy of colonial trauma [which] disarticulated Afro-Indigenous solidarities.”22 This Black and Indigenous exchange and need for solidarity became all the more urgent following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The Black Lives Matter movement was influential in protesting, toppling, or otherwise removing Confederate monuments which stood as symbols of white supremacy in the Southern United States. This impetus soon spread South and Spanish conquistador monuments, particularly monuments to Christopher Columbus, were put under similar scrutiny. Conversations around the monuments served to connect

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the histories of genocide and enslavement of African and Indigenous people, and made apparent the ways in which both groups had historically been pit against each other as well as the power possible in banding together. While we can work to uncover these historical interactions, the written and visual records have their limits. We must also then turn to contemporary reimaginings. Following her Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, artist Simone Leigh described her process: In order to tell the truth, you need to invent what might be missing from the archive, to collapse time, to concern yourself with issues of scale, to formally move things around in a way that reveals something more true than fact.23 Dominican American artist Joiri Minaya’s Encumbrimento/The Cloaking (2019–2020) ­exemplifies just such reinventions. The artist installed cloth coverings over statues of Christopher Columbus and Juan Ponce de León in Miami and Santo Domingo (see Figure 28.2). Printed with tropical floral patterns, the cloths reference medicinal plants used by the ­African and Indigenous populations of the Caribbean. Describing the textiles installed in Miami, Minaya writes: I was looking at plants used in Native American and Black traditions as metaphors of resistance, plants with a poison-healing or poison-defense duality, and traditions of purging, “despojo”, cleansing, casting evil spirits away or protection. I was interested in actual chemicals in the plants, as well as spiritual believes [sic] in relation to plants.24 In her work, Minaya points to Black and Indigenous solidarities seen in folk medicine as a form of resistance against colonial oppression. The installation also serves as an apt visual metaphor for Lionett and Shih’s concept of minor transnationalism: Black and Indigenous knowledge and cultures unite in the textile to render the colonizer invisible, thereby refuting dominant narratives of center and periphery. These are interactions that may not have left much of a mark in the written archive, but survive through oral and popular healing traditions. By positioning these particular plants within the aesthetic of the generically tropical visual culture associated with the Caribbean, the artist resignifies a tourist focused aesthetic. Furthermore, by combining these textiles with commentary on the Christopher Columbus monument, she calls attention to the shared Black and Indigenous histories of the Caribbean. The explorer has been dubbed the “grandfather of the slave trade” for his inauguration of Taíno slavery, trafficking what may have been thousands of people across the Atlantic. The labor force of Indigenous people was soon decimated from disease and excessive labor and by 1501 the Spanish crown issued the first license to send enslaved Africans to the Caribbean. The histories of Black and Indigenous people in the Americas are clearly intimately entwined. And yet due to colonization and white supremacy, the two have been routinely pitted against each other. Turning to the visual arts provides new insight into these minor transnational exchanges throughout the colonial era and can serve as impetus for further solidarity building in the present.

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Figure 28.2  Joiri Minaya, The cloaking of the statue of Christopher Columbus behind the Bayfront Park Amphitheatre, Miami, Florida, 2019, dye-sublimation print on spandex fabric and wood structure. Commissioned by Fringe Projects Miami. Photo by Zachary Balber. Photo courtesy of the artist.

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Notes 1 For more on early development of concepts of race see Lynn T. Ramey, Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014); Pamela Patton, ed, Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America (Leiden: Brill, 2015); Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, eds. The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 2 Françoise Lionnet, and Shu-mei Shih, “Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally,” in Minor Transnationalism, ed. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 2. 3 Edouard Glissánt, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 56. 4 David Buissert, “Introduction,” in Creolization in the Americas, ed. David Buissert and Steven G. Reinhardt (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 2000), 6. 5 Patrick J. Carroll, “Black-Native Relations and the Historical Record,” in Beyond Black and Red: African-native Relations in Colonial Latin America, ed. Matthew Restall (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 252. 6 Matthew Restall, “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America,” The Americas, 57, no. 2 (October 2000), 199. 7 Restall, “Armed Africans,” 175. 8 For more on these images see Elena FitzPatrick Sifford, “Mexican Manuscripts and the First Images of Africans in the Americas,” Ethnohistory, 66, no. 2 (April 2019), 223–248 and Miguel Valerio, “A Mexican Sangamento? The First Afro-Christian Performance in the Americas”, in Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of a Black Atlantic Tradition, ed. Cécile Fromont (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), 62–64. 9 FitzPatrick Sifford, “Mexican Manuscripts.” 10 For more on ethnogenesis in the Americas see James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 68, no. 2 (April 2011), 181–208. 11 https://vistasgallery.ace.fordham.edu/items/show/1903 12 For more on this painting see Thomas Cummins, “Three Gentlemen from Esmeraldas: A Portrait Fit for a King,” in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, ed. A. Lugo-Ortiz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 119–145. and Elena FitzPatrick Sifford, “Indigenous Artists and the Representation of Africans in Colonial Peru,” in Visual Culture and Indigenous Agency in the Americas, ed. Alessia Frassani (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 143–160. 13 For more on Guaman Poma’s depictions of Africans see Eric Vaccarella, “Estrangeros, uellacos, santos, y rreys: La representación de los negros en la obra de Gelipe Guamán Poma de Ayala,” Revista Iberoamericana, 68, no.198 (2002), 13–26; and Valerie Benoist, “La Conexión Entre Casta y Familia en la Representación de los Negros Dentro la Obra de Guaman Poma,” Afro-Hispanic Review, 29, no.1 (2010), 35–54. 14 Guaman Poma 1615: 718. 15 Relación que se have a su excelencia señor de Monterrey Visorrey destors reinod del matança y cabtiverio que hizieron los mulatos de las Esmeraldas en los pueblos de cotongo bolo y Calavilij… y lo sucedido despues 1606,” Folio 4r. As quoted in Tom Cummins, 138. 16 Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 40. 17 For more on Black-Indigenous miscegenation and the “free womb” see Ben Vinson, Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018; and María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 18 Recopilación de las Leyes de los Reynos de Indias (1680) (Madrid: Andrés Ortega, 1774), vol. 2, book 7, 386. As quoted in Katzew, 41. 19 Martínez, 164. 20 Vinson, 45. See also Berta Ares Queija and Allessandro Stella eds. Negros, Mulatos, Zambaigos: Derroteros Africanus en los Mundos Ibéricos (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 2000).

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Selected Bibliography Ares Queija, Berta and Allessandro Stella, eds. Negros, Mulatos, Zambaigos: Derroteros Africanus en los Mundos Ibéricos. Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 2000. Benoist, Valerie. “La Conexión Entre Casta Y Familia en la Representación de Los Negros Dentro la Obra de Guaman Poma.” Afro-Hispanic Review 29, no.1 (2010): 35–54. Carroll, Patrick J. “Black-Native Relations and the Historical Record.” In Beyond Black and Red: African-native Relations in Colonial Latin America, edited by Matthew Restall, 245–269. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Cummins, Tom. “Three Gentlemen from Esmeraldas: A Portrait Fit for a King.” In Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, edited by A. Lugo-Ortiz, 119–145. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013. FitzPatrick Sifford, Elena. “Mexican Manuscripts and the First Images of Africans in the Americas.” Ethnohistory 66, no. 2 (April 2019): 223–248. FitzPatrick Sifford, Elena. “Indigenous Artists and the Representation of Africans in Colonial Peru.” In Visual Culture and Indigenous Agency in the Americas, edited by Alessia Frassani, 143–160. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Lionnet, Françoise and Shu-mei Shih, eds. Minor Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Martínez, María Elena. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Vaccarella, Eric. “Estrangeros, Uellacos, Santos, y Rreys: La Representación de Los Negros en la Obra de Gelipe Guamán Poma de Ayala.” Revista Iberoamericana 68, no.198 (2002): 13–26. Vinson, Ben. Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico. New York: ­Cambridge University Press, 2018.

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29 THE IMPERIAL LANDSCAPE OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ANGLO-INDIAN PORTRAITURE Zirwat Chowdhury

Introduction For historians of Britain’s global empire, Eliza Fay’s letters from India in the late eighteenth century serve as an important archive of the registers of vulnerability, arrogance, wonder, and distress that punctuated the lives of Anglo-Indians, as the British community in South Asia was then called. But they also succinctly demonstrate how imperialism operates as transformations in the webs of relation that configure the social through the incursions of war. In a letter from December 19, 1780, while observing the commencement of a busy season of social dining with the onset of winter, Fay describes the “Burdwan stew” as a popular dish composed of “every thing [sic] at table, fish, flesh, and fowl.”1 Among Fay’s voracious epistolary pronouncements, the stew communicates both the decadent, AngloIndian palate, as well as the incompatibility of an Anglo-Indian constitution—physiological and social—with the tropical climate that it not only inhabited but that also engendered it. Read, however, within the vast textual archives of the East India Company (henceforth, the Company), the “Burdwan stew” finds a powerful echo within another register of epistolary exchange from the mid-eighteenth century. In 1760, three years after its military defeated the nawab or regional governor of Bengal, Siraj ud Daula, at the Battle of Plassey and replaced him with one of his generals, Mir Jafar, the Company seated Mir Qasim as the new nawab of Bengal. In return, the new nawab transferred the revenue administration of Burdwan (and two other regions within Bengal) over to the Company’s hands. In the decade that followed, Company administrators wrote voluminously to one another in their efforts to amass this revenue against the recalcitrance of the region’s landowners, farmers, and merchants, often with the deployment of its troops against them.2 With its appointment as Diwan of Bengal in 1765, a position within the Mughal imperial administration, the Company was tasked with overseeing the revenue collection of the entire region, as well as its civil courts. In 1770, the calamitous Bengal famine confronted audiences in Britain with the question of whether the Company’s maladministration or corruption, or both, was responsible for the desecration of the region.3 Belying the gluttony that Fay dismisses in her “[satisfaction] with plain food,” is thus a sociality of accumulation that transformed the lands of Bengal into the landscape of the Company’s imperial ascendance in South Asia.4 385

DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-34

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As the editors of this volume observe, the decolonization of art history requires rewriting knowledge as we know it by confronting the words and concepts that, circulating without their attendant histories of expropriation and marginalization, normalize and make inevitable the colonialities that inhere in the present. Remaining attentive to relations of power, such scholarship must productively shake the tenor of inevitability that both haunts any historian or art historian’s pacing of the past, present, and future, and burdens with the insurmountable weight of history any effort at social and methodological decolonization. The transformation of land into landscape—especially its correspondence with its namesake genre in European painting—through imperial processes of extraction, dispossession, and aestheticization, as indigenous studies scholars have tirelessly observed and as Fay’s letter illuminates, has become a powerful catalyst for art historical reevaluations of landscape art.5 Building on these scholarly interventions, this chapter examines how landscape as a figuration of imperial war and colonial accumulation appeared within the painterly form of Anglo-Indian portraiture in the late eighteenth century. It compares the family portraits of the first two chief justices of the Supreme Court of Adjudicature (henceforth, the Court) that was established in Calcutta (present-day Kolkata) by legislation in the British Parliament in 1773 in the wake of the Bengal famine. The creation of the Court to regulate the Company’s misuse of its judicial and military power required the extension of English laws to Bengal and this proved complicated in practice in a judicial landscape where the Mughal courts (however transformed by the Company) still existed. The portraits, a conversation piece and a pendant pair (see Figure 29.1), were commissioned by their respective patrons, Sir Elijah Impey and Sir Robert Chambers, during the transition between their appointments in 1783–1784. Given the scandal of corruption that informed Impey’s recall from his position, the portraits of the Chamberses appear to suggest a reservation from the domesticity of the Impey household. Indeed, when viewed through the lens of empirical likeness, the pendant portraits, with their single-figure compositions and stylized simplicity, appear to strip away the compositional liveliness of the Impey conversation piece into an expression of social restraint. Instead, like the poetics that it describes above in Fay’s letter, this chapter traces the correspondences between the forms of compression and dispersion, and those of enclosure and encroachment that respectively organize the Impey conversation piece and Chambers pendant portraits as figurations of the imperial landscape within which both families ascended socially through the accumulation of colonial wealth.

Imperial Spacing In artist Johan Zoffany’s conversation piece of The Impey Family, Sir Elijah Impey and his spouse, Lady Mary (née Reade) are portrayed on the left at a performance of Indian music on the grounds of their home.6 The couple are surrounded by a household comprising not only three of their children dressed in Indian attire but also various Indian attendants. With the youngest Impey child’s placement on the lap of an ayah or nursemaid, the painting’s assembly of the family in a conventional pyramidal organization on the left is elongated into a frieze-like composition towards the seated figures set a little further back on the right. In contrast with this attenuation, the musicians are organized neatly and tightly into a line within the painting’s middleground, thereby embodying the unheard score that convenes the Impeys and now unnamed ayahs into acts of shared but differentiated audition. 386

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Figure 29.1  Arthur William Devis, Lady Frances Chambers, 1784, oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art. [open domain].

Zoffany’s painting belonged to the genre of the conversation piece, where, following the paintings and art theory of William Hogarth, musical harmonies could afford the organization of compositional variety.7 The line of Indian musicians dips down from the figure of the tanpura player to that of the Impeys’s daughter who, moved by the music and cheered by her father, raises her arm in a gesture of dance. Although placed prominently between her mother and the ayahs’ performances of distributed and age-appropriate colonial childcare, she is also oriented towards and stands in closer proximity to her parents.8 Indeed, her position at the bottom right of the family pyramid and the pronounced spacing between her and the ayahs, not to mention her pose, transform her dress from a likely expression of Anglo-Indian habitation into a seemingly light-hearted performance of cross-cultural masquerade. This spacing finds its converse in the tight grouping and triangulation of Sir Elijah’s torso with those of the guard and betel-bearer. Held up next to Sir Elijah’s periwig, the capital-like betel-box or pandan appears both to hold up his head and invite a comparison with it. The striations of white highlights across the two surfaces renders in the one the shiny materiality that contains it value, and in the other its dense volume, thus foregrounding a relation between the accumulation of wealth through luxury objects and the social ascendance that it afforded to men like Impey. The Impeys are known best to art historians for Zoffany’s painting and Lady Mary’s patronage of natural history paintings by Indian artists.9 The latter situates them within a landscape of war and Mughal political fragmentation in India that displaced artists from 387

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the Mughal imperial atelier to regional courts and, with the suppression of nawabi power in Bengal from the late 1750s, the Company’s patronage.10 A painting by Shaikh Zain-ud-Din, one of the three Indian artists working for Lady Mary, demonstrates how her artistic patronage cultivated her social ascendance by transforming the domestic space of the Anglo-Indian home into a courtly one.11 Drawing on the conventions of Mughal darbar (courtly public audience) paintings, it assembles the various attendants and artisans portrayed in her parlor into a procession that culminates in the tribute-like offering of the milliner at the heart of the painting. Following the popular European visual culture of turquerie or cross-cultural masquerade, Lady Mary’s portrayal in a turban blurs already-imagined Ottoman and South Asian geographies and transforms her into a “sultana” in Zain-ud-Din’s painting.12 In 1780, a few years before the making of Zoffany’s painting, the Impeys had received a significant boost to their income with Sir Elijah’s appointment by the Company’s governor-general in Bengal, Warren Hastings—also a former schoolmate of Impey—to head the Company’s separate court of appeal. Any additional appointment was strictly forbidden by the rules of the Court. Given the Court’s imperative to regulate the actions of the Company and redress its abuses, the appointment marked a notable conflict of interest. The Court’s notorious decision under Impey to execute a zamindar or landowner, Maharaja Nandakumar Ray, who had brought charges of bribery against Hastings in 1775, had already compromised its standing as an institution of redress. It was also one of the key reasons for Sir Elijah’s recall in 1783. Sir Elijah’s corruption was, for many of his critics, inextricably linked to his purported acculturation to South Asian customs and thus a form of political despotism that a prevailing European cultural discourse attributed to the impact of climate on society and politics in tropical regions.13 Instead of such a picture of “Asiatick” despotism, the armed guard wedged between Sir Elijah and Lady Mary intrudes into Zoffany’s scene of domesticity as a figuration of the geography of war within which the Company ascended as an imperial power from the mid-eighteenth century and that also enriched its officials. At the opposite end of the painting from the triad of Impey, the betel-bearer, and the guard, is a turbaned musician who turns his head to look at his companions. He appears to be a reworking of the sitter’s torso in Zoffany’s portrait from around the same time of Hasan Reza Khan, minister to the nawab of Awadh in whose neighboring court the artist had been stationed while the Company negotiated higher tribute payments from him.14 In the compositional stretching of Zoffany’s painting beyond the conventional pyramid of the family portrait thus appears the spacing of an imperial landscape within which Anglo-Indians such as the Impeys accumulated through the processes of colonial extraction the wealth that constituted the social form of their convivial domesticity. Appointed acting chief justice following Sir Elijah Impey’s recall, Sir Robert Chambers commissioned in 1784 a pair of pendant portraits of himself and his spouse, Lady Frances (née Wilton) from artist Arthur W. Devis. He appears in the middle of Devis’s portrait, strikingly dressed in his red judicial robes.15 Resting his right arm on a table next to leatherbound volumes and a quill, he holds in his hand a partially opened scroll with the conventional letters “In the S …” just visible enough to identify it as a document of the Court.16 Chambers’s colleague, Justice John Hyde, recorded the Court’s deliberations in a series of notebooks from 1774, with contributions by Chambers from 1785.17 To Sir Robert’s left is a view of the grassy park still known as the Maidan (a Persian word for an outdoor gathering place), as it was likely seen from the new court building on the Esplanade, where several new administrative buildings of the Company were constructed in these decades of its imperial ascendance in the region.18 In the portrait, Chambers appears to lean back and 388

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invite a closer look at the landscape next to him. His bewigged head, flowing robes, and heavy ermine cuffs together triangulate a judicial scale that appears to hold in a balance the legal documents on the left against the landscape view on the right. The Court’s co-existence alongside the Company-led civil courts, indeed its existence within the Company’s settlement in Calcutta, raised many debates about the extent of its jurisdiction. As Indians and non-Indians alike brought their pleas before the Court to contest the decisions of the Company in the civil courts, the Company petitioned Parliament to contest the Court’s jurisdiction. The 1781 Act of Settlement circumscribed the Court’s jurisdiction to the residents of Calcutta, South Asians contractually employed by British subjects, and British subjects in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa.19 The framing, indeed the enclosure of the view of the Maidan by the giant Doric columns in Sir Robert’s portrait, seems to correspond with this limited jurisdiction of the Court. However, viewing it in relation to the landscape in Lady Frances’s portrait illuminates how more notable than the restraints on Sir Robert’s judicial responsibilities was the Chambers’s participation in the Company’s encroaching landscape. The Chambers’s portraits observe the gendered conventions of marital portraits that often contrasted the indoor, occupational setting of the male sitter with the naturalistic outdoor setting of the female sitter. Although Sir Robert’s bright crimson robes match the visual weight of Lady Frances’s luminescent white gown, her fi ­ gure overshadows his with the combination of its brightness, as well as the mass and volume of her skirt. The giant Doric column on the right edge of his portrait underlines Sir Robert’s diminutive stature. Although the playful visual echo between the drapery above Sir Robert and the crooked branches above Lady Frances invites an imagination of continuity between the portraits, the looming pipal tree, as well as the continuity in the respective shadows on the bottom left of Lady Frances’s portrait and the right edge of Sir Robert’s portrait intimate a sense of encroachment by the landscape surrounding Lady Frances.

An Imperial Monument The pipal tree behind Lady Frances not only discloses her South Asian environs, but, with the formal correspondences between its foliage and the soft edges of her curls, also marks her relationship to her natural setting as one of both ease and resemblance. Portraiture in these decades in Britain, especially as practiced by artist Thomas Gainsborough, was conversant in a discourse of sensibility that disavowed a superficial civility and valorized women’s naturalness or their proximity to nature and heightened capacity for feeling.20 Such a performance of sensibility informs the sitter’s ease of disposition in Lady Frances’s portrait, but it is also inverted by it. For example, the flush of crimson on Lady Mary’s face, especially its contrast with the more limited palette of that of Sir Elijah, translates a prevailing British pictorial convention that painted the blush as an expression of feminine sensibility into a physiological response to the sun and heat of the tropics.21 By contrast, Lady Frances’s glimmering whiteness not only sets her apart from the warm glow of the landscape surrounding her, but it also makes her stand out as the more striking of the two sitters in the pendant portraits. A correspondence between femininity and nature within the discourse of sensibility underscored, through an aesthetic of lushness, women’s reproductive function in society. Lady Frances is, however, both unaccompanied by any children and, with her almost ghostly whiteness, takes on a corpse-like appearance. Lady Frances was often praised in journals and memoirs of British residents in Calcutta for her youthful beauty, fashionability, and sociability.22 One contemporary who 389

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attended her sitting before Devis exalted the artist’s success in capturing these qualities in his portrait, even as she lamented the artist’s unaffordable prices.23 Allegedly introduced to Sir Robert in London by the artist and President of the Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lady Frances offered a mutually beneficial match for the India-bound judge. Not only was her father, Joseph Wilton, the King’s official sculptor, but she also brought with her an inheritance (from her grandfather) of a house in the fashionable Cavendish Square in London. Her father’s connections at court would subsequently prove useful to Sir Robert, on whose behalf he was sent to lobby on many occasions.24 Two of Sir Robert’s luminary friends remarked upon the urgency of his hastened marriage. Dr. Samuel Johnson teased how Sir Robert had lured a 16-year-old Frances Wilton—in fact, she was 15 and the couple had to receive a special permit to marry—into marriage with his “lawyer tongue” on the eve of his journey to India in 1774.25 It was more common for men to travel to the West and East Indies in the eighteenth century without a spouse given prevailing concerns about white women’s suitability to the climate and social life of the tropics.26 Indeed, on hearing the news of his departure for India, the diarist and Bluestocking Hester Thrale wrote the following verse of ekphrasis to describe his portrait by Reynolds: In this luminous Portrait requiring no Shade, See Chambers’ soft Character, sweetly display’d; Oh quickly return with that genuine Smile, Nor longer let India’s Temptations beguile; But fly from those Climates where moist Relaxation Invades with her Torpor th [sic] effeminate Nation; Where Metals and Marbles will melt and decay, Fear, Man, for thy Virtue, and hasten away.27 [Emphases mine] Thrale’s verse voices a prevailing concern about the deleterious effects of India’s tropical climate on the health and characters of those who traveled there.28 While she is explicit about the threat of effeminacy that was feared in this climate, she is more discreet about the “temptations” that it holds and the dangers that it might pose to one’s “virtue.” Although Sir Robert remained a bachelor in concordance with the rules of his position at Oxford, he had fathered a child out of marriage.29 Scholars have differed about the regulation and enforcement of marriage from the mid-eighteenth century onward in Britain. As Daniel Livesay notes, an increasing emphasis on endogamy secured elite ownership of property in the face of wavering economic fortunes. He thus points out that the Hardwicke Act of 1753, which largely enforced prior laws that required announcements and parental consent for marriage, also introduced the power of the courts to annul marriages that did not correspond with these requirements.30 However, it was not rare for children born out of wedlock among aristocrats and rising elites to secure the financial support of their fathers, even if they were increasingly viewed with suspicion for embodying rival claims upon the inheritance of property.31 As Ann Bermingham has compellingly argued, Gainsborough’s transformation of landscape painting was largely possible due to the financial support of the annuity that his spouse, Margaret (née Burr) Gainsborough received as the “natural” daughter—following the period expression to describe children born out of wedlock—of the Duke of Beaufort.32 The widespread knowledge of the sexual relations of British men 390

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Figure 29.2  Arthur William Devis, Col. William Monson, his wife Anne Monson, and an Indian Attendant, 1786, oil on canvas, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. [open domain].

in India, however, would have posed another range of concerns for a high-ranking Crownofficial like Chambers. In India, few British women were deemed to be of suitable birth and reputation, and sexual relations between British men and Indian women was more common.33 As Erica Wald has demonstrated, it was even encouraged as a safeguard for martial virility and thus shepherded by the Company’s military.34 Military and administrative officers often had long-standing Indian companions or bibis, although marriage (even though an option) was rare. It was not rare for the sexual intimacies of British men in this environment to produce Eurasian offspring.35 Two years following his portraits of the Chamberses, Devis painted an outdoor conversation piece of Captain William Monson and his new bride, Ann (née Débonnaire) Monson with an Indian attendant (1786; see Figure 29.2). The army officer is shown in the uniform of the King’s regiment in which he served, his bright white vest, breeches, and stockings appearing untarnished by their tropical environs.36 The Monsons and the Indian attendant are shown in Berhampore, a military barrack town outside Calcutta.37 Berhampore, as Wald has demonstrated, was also viewed in this period as a site of sexual transgression.38 Standing in the middle of the painting, William Monson looks down upon his spouse, resting his right hand over the back of the chair on which she sits and fashionably crossing his right leg over his left. Seated in three-quarter profile pose, Ann Monson points her left forefinger down at the ground, a gesture that finds an instant echo in the keychain that dangles and glimmers provocatively on William Monson’s breeches. 391

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If the line of William Monson’s right arm dips down towards Ann Monson, it moves up again with the profiled pose of the diminutive Indian attendant who stands on the elevated mound behind her holding William Monson’s tricorne hat and baton. Like the Captain, he too is dressed in red, gold, and white, albeit in a simpler arrangement and certainly with a darker (indeed, dirtier) tone of white.39 In her discussion of this portrait, Beth Fowkes Tobin has argued that given that the British could officially only lease land and, until the 1780s, purchase it only through Eurasian relatives, Devis’s paintings expressed colonial dominion, however tenuously, over the subordinated and decorative figures of Indian attendants.40 Within the changing judicial landscape of Bengal, any resemblance between Anglo-Indians and Indians posed concerns regarding the identification of British subjects. As Hannah Weiss-Muller traces in her comprehensive study of the cases brought before the Court, its proceedings were often thwarted by any clear definition of who counted as a “British subject.”41 What determined the conditions of residency in Calcutta and who could be identified as a British subject outside Calcutta varied from case to case. However, rulings by the Court in 1782 and 1783 identified “British residents” as those who were Irish, Scottish, and English, whereas Europeans and South Asians, especially the latter, were increasingly identified as the “inhabitants of Calcutta.”42 Further, as Durba Ghosh and Indrani Chatterjee have both demonstrated, the outlawing of Eurasian children from being able to travel to Britain for education—a critical avenue for the cultural production of racialized difference—and their gradual elimination from military service foregrounded the racialized distinctions between British and South Asian subjects that secured imperial rule in this period.43 The Monson conversation piece, on the one hand, shows the couple on tropical grounds that were understood to compromise their racial legibility as white, British subjects. One prevailing concern was that British men often developed “tawny” complexions over the course of their tenure in India, an alleged symptom of the likeness that they developed with Indians through social and sexual intercourse.44 Ann Monson, as the daughter of a Huguenot merchant whose trade was carried out primarily between Portugal and Madras, was more likely to count as a European than a British subject per the Court’s determinations.45 Her dusky complexion offers a marked contrast with the paleness of Lady Chambers, and her fashionability appears to fall short of its desired performance. Her extravagant dress appears to be constrained by a surfeit of yellow ribbons on her sleeves. Although the explosion of ribbons points, like the floral wreath on her hair, to her reproductive future, the lilac of her dress echoes that of the foreboding clouds in the tropical sky. If the painting inscribes the anticipated reproductive future of the couple between their pointing finger and dangling keychain, the form of reproductive sexuality more common to the landscape of Berhampore lurks within the anagram-like resemblance in color between William Monson and the attendant. Returning to the portrait of Lady Chambers, the shadows around her eyes temper the otherwise youthful appearance of the sitter, who had within the previous three years experienced the death of two of her children in their infancy, and the tragic unaccounted loss of a son who was lost at shipwreck during his journey to England for his education.46 Contrary to the conventions of sensibility and naturalism, the blue underpaint around Lady Frances’s eyes and along the folds of her dress appears to petrify the sitter into a state that hovers between the marmoreal and unliving.47 Lady Frances’s father, Joseph Wilton, was known best in Britain for his memorial at Westminster Abbey to General James Wolfe, the nation’s imperial icon from the Seven Years’s War.48 Staging a playful paragone with the sculptor 392

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and nodding to the Pygmalion myth beloved to European artists in the eighteenth century, Devis’s portrait transforms Wilton’s living creation to resemble one of his imperial effigies.49 Indeed, the white highlights that stretch along the folds of the skirt of Lady Frances’s robe endow it with luminosity and, with their opacity, a sense of heaviness that makes it appear to be made out of marble rather than silk. Heightened by the chalky whiteness of her billowing gown, her paleness presents an unnatural body deprived of circulation and life. Adding this quality of grief to her face, Devis’s portrayal of his marmoreal subject demonstrated that she had retained her Britishness as a dutiful form of racialized maternity in the tropical environment of Bengal. In so doing, this portrait of a grieving mother translates the public stone memorials made by the sitter’s father on the occasion of the British nation’s imperial ascendance across the globe into the intimate realm of imperial domesticity, where “natural” reproduction was a risk.

Conclusion If Lady Frances’s maternal grief is rendered monumental in Devis’s portrait, it achieves a similar dimension by its near absence in her almanac from 1784. Her annotations do not begin until about March, and gain frequency as the year progresses. A stoic nod to the remembrance of her son at Lent—“went into mourning for my dear unhappy Thomas”— stands out starkly against the negative space of the calendar’s facing page. With each turn of page surfaces a busier and busier social calendar of teas and estate visits with the spouses of the other judges, and, with the cooling of winter, her attendance of several dances. In marked contrast to the pithy remembrance of her deceased son is the proliferation of details about the extravagant dresses she wore, including their material, color, and maker.50 How her grief looms over a social calendar that appears to move unhesitatingly into a more festive series of activities finds an echo in the relationship between the two pendant portraits. As noted above, the landscape around Lady Frances appears to encroach over Sir Robert’s portrait. As his colleagues observed, Sir Robert’s attendance at court was irregular and even rare. In 1784, the year in which Devis painted the two portraits, Chambers did not appear at court until March and had long intervals of absence later in the year as well. That year, he remained absent as he traveled outside Calcutta in order to recover from, among other illnesses, bouts of “jungle fever.”51 The couple also traveled in their periods of grief. Fay, for example, wrote of the couple’s travel to Birkul down and up the Hughly river for a bathing retreat following the premature death of another son—at whose christening the Impeys had stood—in 1782.52 What appears as the family’s peregrinations of retreat and recovery starts to illuminate a trail of property that they acquired and the imprint of Anglo-Indian life that they made across Bengal along the way. Fay recounted in 1780 not only the high financial value of one such purchase, but also how its set up had occupied Lady Frances’s time.53 Curiously, the Chambers’s garden estate in “Chiringhy” (Chowringhee) found mention in the court’s records as a place marker during a trial in December 1784 amid deliberations that ensued regarding the boundary of Calcutta and the jurisdiction of the Court in relation to that of the Company.54 As Sir Elijah had done in 1780, Sir Robert accepted another appointment in 1781, in his case as governor of Chinsura, a settlement near Calcutta that had just been taken from the Dutch. The appointment added to his income the equivalent of nearly a third of his already lucrative remuneration as a judge. Justice Hyde, deemed the most critical among the justices of the Company, recorded a personal encounter with Lady Frances 393

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in 1781 where she allegedly declared that, in accepting the Chinsura appointment, she and her husband had eschewed “honor and honesty” in the pursuit of wealth.55 An imperial landscape where war, profit, and pleasure converged is succinctly described by none other than Fay. Writing of the beauty of the garden estates like the one in which Lady Frances appears in her portrait, Fay referred, proto-cinematically, to the view of the riverside on which estates such as those of the Chambers’s stood. She writes that “the different kinds of pleasure boats intermixed with mercantile vessels, and ships of war, render the whole a magnificent and beautiful moving picture … at once exhilarating the heart, and charming the senses.”56 Lady Frances appears in her portrait seated on the grounds of what was likely the family’s garden estate just to the south of Calcutta in Bhawanipur, one of the several properties that Sir Robert acquired during his Indian sojourn. In their pursuit of social ascendance, the Chamberses created an imperial landscape that finds figuration in the relation of figure and ground in Lady Frances’s portrait. The Muslim tomb that hazily appears in the background of Lady Frances’s portrait corresponds, on the one hand, with the conventions of the picturesque that transformed the lands of Bengal into a ruin and thus, in the name of civilizational progress, opened it up for colonial intervention.57 On the other hand, it also resonates with the memorializing function of the portrait. In so doing, the latter naturalizes the Chambers’s financial and social ascendance through their participation in the colonial settlement of Bengal into a grief-stricken act of maternity.

Acknowledgment I would like to thank Dr. Amy Torbert and Professor Felicity Nussbaum, as well as the editors of this volume, for their generous feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter.

Notes 1 Eliza Fay, “December 19, 1780,” in Original Letters from India, annotated by E.M. Forster (New York: New York Review of Books, 2010), 189. 2 That the Company had inserted itself into the revenue administration of the place even before Mir Qasim’s official transfer of its collection appears across the pages of British Library Add MSS 29026. 3 P. J. Marshall, “Parliament and Property Rights in the late Eighteenth-Century British Empire,” in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London: Routledge, 1996), 534. 4 Eliza Fay, “December 19, 1780,” in Original Letters from India, 189. 5 Mishuana Goeman, “Land as Life: Unsettling the Logics of Containment,” in Native Studies Keywords, ed. Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle H. Raheja (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 71–89; Julia Lum, “Fire-Stick Picturesque: Landscape Art and Early ­Colonial Tasmania,” British  Art Studies 10, https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058–5462/issue-10/ jlum, last accessed on April 21, 2022. 6 Johan Zoffany, The Impey Family, 1783–1784, oil on canvas. Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum. 7 I explore this in greater detail in my current book manuscript, Enlightened Relations: EighteenthCentury British Art and the Indies. 8 Suzanne Conway, “Ayah, Caregiver to Anglo-Indian Children, c. 1750–1947,” in Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World, ed. Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 41–58. 9 Maya Jasanoff, “A Passage through India: Zoffany in Calcutta & Lucknow,” in Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed, ed. Martin Postle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 125–139;

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Imperial Landscape of Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Portraiture Gillian Forrester, “The Impey Family,” in Ibid, 265; Andrew Topsfield, “The Natural History Paintings of Shaikh Zain-ud-Din, Bhawani Das and Ram Das,” in Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, ed. William Dalrymple (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2019), 40–47 & 183–185. 10 Natasha Eaton, Mimesis and Empire: Artworks and Networks, 1765–1860 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 11 Shaikh Zain-ud-Din, Lady Mary Impey Supervising her Household, 1783, opaque watercolor on paper, private collection. 12 For an incisive discussion of turquerie and cross-cultural masquerade, see Michael Yonan, Empress Marie Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 72–76, 135–153, 196, 205–206. 13 Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 8–18. 14 Johan Zoffany, Portrait of Hasan Reza Khan, oil on canvas, 1784. British Library. For a discussion of how Zoffany’s Lucknow paintings materialized within the Company’s extractive efforts and the nawab’s subversion of them, see Eaton, Mimesis and Empire, 162–172. 15 Arthur William Devis, Sir Robert Chambers, 1784, oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art. 16 My thanks to Jessica David and Robert Batchelor for their generous help with identifying the words on the scroll. 17 Carol Siri Johnson, Hydebooks Project, https://hydebooks.njit.edu/characters/chambers.php (last accessed: October 10, 2022). 18 Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture, 1770–1825 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), 239. 19 Hannah Weiss Muller, Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 171, 195–199. 20 G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility : Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Ann Bermingham, “Gainsborough’s Cottage Door: Sensation and Sensibility,” in Sensation & Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s Cottage Door, ed. Ann Bermingham (Yale University Press, 2005), 1–34, 198–200. 21 Angela Rosenthal, “Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-­ Century British Portraiture,” Art History 27, no. 4 (September 2004): 563–592. 22 Fay, “22 May, 1780,” in Original Letters from India 174. 23 Archer, 239. 24 In turn, Chambers brought not only rank, but his father-in-law would often turn to him for loans to support his expensive lifestyle. Thomas M. Curley, Sir Robert Chambers: Law, Literature, and Empire in the Age of Johnson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), [158, 159, 253, 263, 355]. 25 Archer, India and British Portraiture, 239. 26 Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700– 1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 6. 27 My thanks to Professor Felicity Nussbaum for sharing the corrected passage with me from Hester Lynch Piozzi, Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs. Piozzi) 1776–1809, ed. Katherine. C. Balderston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), 473. Also quoted with modifications in Curley, Sir Robert Chambers, 151. 28 Elizabeth M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: the Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800–1947 (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2001) and, Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, And Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 29 Curley, Sir Robert Chambers, 157. 30 Daniel Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833 (Williamsburg: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2018), 57–58. 31 Susan Staves, “Resentment or Resignation? Dividing the Spoils among Daughters and Younger Sons,” in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London: Routledge, 1996), 209–214.

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Zirwat Chowdhury 32 Ann Bermingham, “Daughters and Sisters: Gainsborough’s Portraits of Mary and Margaret,” in Gainsborough’s Family Album, ed. David Solkin (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2018), 43–44. 33 Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: Privacy in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 25–27. 34 Erica Wald, Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780– 1868 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 24–25. 35 Durba Ghosh, “Decoding the Nameless: Gender, Subjectivity, and Historical Methodologies in Reading the Archives of Colonial India,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 297–316. 36 Marcia Pointon, “Accessories as Portraits and Portraits as Accessories,” in Das Portrat als Kulturelle Praxis, ed. Eva-Bettina Krems and Sigrid Ruby (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2016), 45–59. 37 Archer, India and British Portraiture, 246. 38 Erica Wald, Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780– 1868 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 36. 39 Beth Fowkes Tobin notes this affinity too as an example of the difficulty of establishing difference in the “alien land” of Bengal in Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760–1820 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 110–115. 40 Beth Fowkes Tobin, “The English Garden Conversation Piece in India,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 178. 41 This last criterion was written with the caveat that on personal matters of inheritance and succession South Asians would be subject to Hindu and Muslim laws and local customs. Weiss Muller, Subjects and Sovereign, 195. 42 Weiss Muller, Subjects and Sovereign, 192–198. 43 Ghosh, “Decoding the Nameless,” 297–316 and Indrani  Chatterjee, “Colouring Subalternity: Slaves, Concubines and Social Orphans in Early Colonial India,”  Subaltern  Studies X (1999): 49–97. 44 Cohen, Family Secrets, 27 and Viccy Coltman, “Sojourning Scots and the Portrait Miniature in Colonial India, 1770s–1780s,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 3 (2017): 421–441. 45 Rev. David C.A. Agnew, “Protestant Exiles from France,” Chiefly in the Reign of Louis XIV…, Vol. II (1886): 502–503. For an important case study of elite British imperial family formations in India, especially negotiations of ethnic, cultural, and racialized differences, see Margot C. Finn, “Family Formations: Anglo India and the Familial Proto-State,” in Structures and Transformations in Modern British History, ed. David Feldman and Jon Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 100–117. 46 Curley, Sir Robert Chambers, 345–351. 47 My observation here is indebted to Sarah Betzer’s incisive reading of “Ingres’s Second Madame Moitessier: ‘Le Brevet du Peintre d’Histoire,’” Art History 23, no. 5 (2000): 681–705. 48 Douglas Fordham, “Scalping: Social rites in Westminster Abbey,” in Art and the British Empire, eds. T. Barringer, G. Quilley and D. Fordham (Manchester: Manchester Univesity Press, 2007), 99–119. 49 For the Pygmalion myth in eighteenth-century art and visual culture, see Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “Pompadour’s Touch: Difference in Representation,” Representations 73, no. 1 (2001): 54–88. 50 Almanac for the Year of our Lord MDCCLXXXIV (Calcutta: Office of the Mission, 1784), British Library Mss Eur A172. 51 “March 15, 1784” in The Judicial Notebooks of John Hyde and Sir Robert Chambers, 1774–1798, Accessible online at The Hydebooks Project, directed by Carol Siri Johnson, https://­hydebooks. njit.edu/browse/2155 (last accessed: October 10, 2022). 52 Fay, “25 May, 1781,” in Original Letters from India, 215 and Fay, “17 March, 1782,” in Original Letters from India, 215. 53 Fay, “19 December, 1780,” 188. 54 Archer, India and British Portraiture, 239; “Rex v. Omar Bund,” December 21, 1784, Accessible at: https://hydebooks.njit.edu/browse/2475

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Imperial Landscape of Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Portraiture 55 Carol Siri Johnson and Andrew Otis, “Hyde’s Shorthand,” https://hydebooks.njit.edu/shorthand/ shorthand.php 56 Fay, “22 May, 1780,” 172. 57 Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill ed.,  William Hodges: The Art of Exploration, 1744–1797 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

Selected Bibliography Chatterjee, Indrani. “Colouring Subalternity: Slaves, Concubines and Social Orphans in Early ­Colonial India,” Subaltern Studies X (1999), 49–97. Eaton, Natasha. Mimesis and Empire: ­Artworks and Networks, 1765–1860 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). Finn, Margot C. “Family Formations: Anglo India and the Familial Proto-State,” in Structures and Transformations in Modern British History, ed. David Feldman and Jon Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 100–117. Ghosh, Durba. “Decoding the Nameless: Gender, Subjectivity, and Historical Methodologies in Reading the Archives of Colonial India,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 297–316. Goeman, Mishuana. “Land as Life: Unsettling the Logics of Containment,” in Native Studies Keywords, ed. Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith and Michelle H. Raheja (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 71–89. Marshall, P. J. “Parliament and Property Rights in the late Eighteenth-Century British Empire,” in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London: Routledge, 1996), 530–544.Nussbaum, Felicity. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in ­Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Rosenthal, Angela. “Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture,” Art History 27, no. 4 (September 2004), 563–592. Staves, Susan. “Resentment or Resignation? Dividing the Spoils among Daughters and Younger Sons,” in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London: Routledge, 1996), 194–218. Weiss Muller, Hannah. Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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30 UNSEEING ART HISTORY Inca Material Culture Andrew James Hamilton

Decolonization is sometimes popularly discussed as if the critical work of dismantling ­European colonial systems and structures would restore a prior a-colonial existence. The Incas, however, were a formidable colonial power who themselves were colonized by Spain. In trying to determine and diminish the impact of colonial European thought and frameworks on understandings of Inca art, it is necessary to simultaneously account for and confront Inca colonial practices. In fact, the pursuit of the former can directly assist in the latter in order to better understand colonialism in its multiple forms. Inca society arose during the late 1300s in Cusco in what is now Peru. Within 150 years, they subjugated countless regional communities to amass the largest Indigenous polity that ever existed in the A ­ mericas, stretching from southern Colombia to central Chile and Argentina. As they did so, they produced material culture and built environments that were markedly different from those of the people they attempted to conquer as revealed by the archaeological record. Their empire was invaded by Francisco Pizarro in 1532 and conquered over the next four decades. Spanish authors wrote numerous texts describing Inca histories, practices, and beliefs, as well as dictionaries transcribing Inca words for the first time. These texts elucidate many aspects of the Inca archaeological record, but also the distortions of a Spanish gaze. Eventually, Indigenous authors wrote their own accounts; however, they were often designed to advance personal agendas within Spanish society.1 These multiple, often conflicting sources and bodies of evidence have left the nature of Inca art enigmatic. Since the earliest art historical discussions of Inca art, scholars have most often described it as abstract and geometric. George Kubler—considered the father of pre-Columbian art history—in his seminal survey of art of the Ancient Americas, stated that in Inca art “­detailed surfaces are avoided in favour of extreme geometric clarity.”2 He noted that “­Inca representations are limited to the generalized statement of normal appearances, and they are applied to instruments and objects of utilitarian character.”3 He suggested that pictorial imagery on wood cups that the Incas called keros was only introduced through colonialism and the emulation of European artistic traditions. The qualities of Inca art that led to these characterizations can be appreciated in their ceramics. Although Incas may have called their principal vessel type an urpu, scholars have DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-35 398

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referred to the long-necked and conical-bottomed ceramic as an aryballos because of its similarity to the ancient Greek vessel. This is significant because it perhaps suggests the illegibility of the ceramic’s abstract features and, therefore, the need to understand it through an external analogy to European artistic ontologies. An example stewarded by the Art Institute of Chicago (1955.2214) was largely painted with thick vertical red lines and finer black-and-red lines that are vertical, horizontal, and diagonal, creating columns of patterns that are bilaterally symmetrical. In describing such compositions, John Rowe, an archaeologist and anthropologist of the Incas, once observed that “the painted designs … consist of simple elements repeated from jar to jar in the same order and so mechanically that they might almost be machine-printed.”4 This comment reveals how the geometric and nonrepresentational qualities of Inca art have, at times, served to diminish appreciation of the artist’s hand. Indeed, Kubler witheringly concluded that The intrinsic meaning of Inca art reinforces the general impression of an oppressive state. It is as if, with the military expansion of the empire, all expressive faculties, both individual and collective, had been depressed by utilitarian aims to lower and lower levels of achievement.5 Inca art is also regarded as abstract and geometric in comparison to the artistic traditions of the cultures they conquered. Artists in the powerful Chimú kingdom followed the north coast practice of creating stirrup-spout vessels with representational forms, whether shaped by hand or even molded from actual gourds and ears of corn. And although Inca artists made allusions to earlier Wari works, Waris, too, created highly naturalistic sculptural ceramics, most notably shaped like llamas and alpacas. Even the more abstract and geometric images that Waris wove into tunics remain clearly representational. Although Kubler suggested that pictorial imagery was introduced to Inca art through Spanish colonial rule, of course, it had always existed in the Andes. The Incas simply made artistic choices that led them to less often create it. This disjunction should give scholars pause. Because of the availability of Spanish-­ colonial historical sources, Inca culture has long been used as a lens to try to understand pre-Inca societies. This tendency has perhaps increased as a result of efforts to decolonize academic fields by invoking Indigenous terms over European ones. But looking for specifically Quechua concepts like huaca, camay, ayni, tinku, or ukhu, among others, in the archaeological records of pre-Inca, non-Quechua-speaking cultures only reenacts the Incas’ colonization, as Lisa Trever has also recently observed.6 Scholars must be wary of “Incaifying” the art of earlier cultures, when Inca artists were likely deliberately trying to distinguish themselves from it as a colonial strategy. Since Kubler and Rowe’s tepid assessments of Inca art, numerous scholars have come to embrace its qualities of geometry and abstraction, deepening modern appreciation of them. For example, César Paternosto, building on studies by Mary Frame and Rebecca Stone, has argued that the abstract and geometric qualities of Inca art were derived from textiles, the pinnacle of Inca artistic traditions: Essentially, the grid of vertical warps and horizontal wefts influenced weavers to create geometric and abstract motifs that subsequently impacted Inca art more broadly.7 This argument is compelling; certainly textiles bore great influence in the Inca Empire. The designs painted onto the urpu at the Art Institute, in fact, coincide with the compositions of warp-patterned textiles presently made in the Cusco region. Because these textiles are constructed from two separately woven, identical panels, 399

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their columns of patterns are also symmetrical across their center seam. It is possible that the ceramic’s designs took inspiration from similar textiles woven during the Inca period. Still, this explanation based in formal similarity does not necessarily explain why Inca textiles themselves had geometric patterns. Certainly, warps and wefts can be used to create geometric motifs, but expert weavers can also readily create non-linear and even pictorial shapes. Weavers were not simply obeying a grid of threads; they had greater agency. Rather than a straightforward causal relationship, textile artists were almost certainly working alongside makers in other media to achieve overarching goals. What, then, does it mean to call Inca art geometric and abstract? And how can these qualities be understood in relation to pre-Inca artistic traditions? Art historians often consider abstraction in binary opposition to representation, in part due to the influence of early twentieth century, Euro-American, abstract painters. It might be tempting to imagine Inca artists reacting against earlier representational artistic traditions in the same way as Picasso and Kandinsky. Such a scenario might fit with Geoffrey Conrad’s argument that the “simplification” of existing ideas was an Inca imperial strategy intended to make state propaganda less complex and more accessible.8 But Carolyn Dean has helpfully pointed out that “Art” may be too Eurocentric of a term.9 Inca makers almost certainly conceptualized things they created in different ways from European notions of art. Therefore, it seems even less likely that Incas developed a modern Euro-American concept of abstraction, or necessarily considered it in opposition to representation. How, then, can we understand the qualities of Inca art that only we might describe as abstract? Rather than characterizing Inca art as non-representational—defining it by a negation or absence, which some may construe as a deficiency—are there other ways to think about what Inca art positively achieved? And could it be that what we call geometry and abstraction were not the end goals of Inca makers but rather symptoms of a different artistic approach? In answering this question, it is important to consider how visuality may have worked in Inca art. Inca makers created many objects that embodied other things at reduced scales.10 Especially in the absence of colonial period textual descriptions, such relationships can often only now be identified if the reduced-scale object bears a visual resemblance to its referent. Nonetheless, the threshold for this visual representation was often very low. For example, Incas created a monolithic stone slab at Machu Picchu as a reduced-scale embodiment of the mountain Yanantin. Called the Sacred Rock today, it bears only a passing resemblance to the distant peak. But although visual representation is only minimally at work in the carving, visual perception remains integral to understanding its act of signification. The makers, rather than laboring to heighten the stone’s visual representation, built structures to each side of it to force viewers to see it from angles where the mountain is behind it. Equally essential to the act of seeing is the void between the reduced-scale sculpture and its referent. The carvers placed the sculpture at the edge of the settlement where the chasm over the Urubamba River allows for an uninterrupted view of the peak. For understanding the carving’s visual representation, the spatialized act of viewing is as important as, if not more important than, its carved, representational qualities. Thus, while the Sacred Rock could today be called abstract, this perhaps misses or misidentifies how signification works within the sculpture. Given this inversion or subversion of visuality, it is worth wondering how scholars could even prove that Inca artists typically regarded the visual as the primary valence of the things they created. In the Euro-American tradition, art is habitually considered “the visual arts.” 400

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Dean has shown the trouble with the term “Art,” and both “visual culture” and “visual studies” have been used as alternatives. But there may also be trouble with the visual. Euro-American intellectual traditions have long prioritized the visual over the other senses, a bias that has been critiqued as ocularcentrism by Martin Jay, among other scholars.11 Ocularcentrism normativizes the visual as the central mode of signification within things we call art and promotes the act of seeing as the primary means of understanding them. It further cements the role of seeing in art historical interpretation through “visual analysis” and “close looking.” Research published in books with printed images and the teaching of art history through slides mechanically reinforce this visual understanding of art, as well as the “look, but don’t touch” policies of museums. These modalities create a sort of feedback loop where the visual and visuality remain ever dominant, perhaps overlooking other ways that made objects might be given, gain, or carry cultural meanings. While Inca art has, at times, been regarded as wanting or unimpressive when judged against a European, visioncentered rubric, it is necessary to consider how these objects intrinsically suggest they were conceptualized by Inca makers. Other reduced-scale objects that the Incas made reveal alternate ways of enacting signification. Numerous scaled objects bore a material relationship to their referents, which seemingly superseded the role of visual representation. For example, Incas carved small stones into alpacas and llamas with rotund, legless bodies, which they called conopas. More important than their visual appearance were the holes that their makers carved into their backs—a non-representational feature—that owners filled with offerings of llama fat. These actions would appease the conopas, which Incas believed were embodiments of living alpacas and llamas. Conopas were thought to reciprocate by ensuring the prosperity of their owners’ flocks, which was materially embodied by the offerings of fat and visually reinforced by the roundness of the carving. Inca weavers also created reduced-scale textiles that prominently emphasized their materials. For example, they created reduced-scale tunics covered with the checkerboard patterns worn by Inca royal guards. However, the actual uniforms usually had ten rows and eleven columns of black-and-white squares. In contrast, the reduced-scale versions were visually abridged with only four or five rows and columns. Importantly, Inca weavers created smaller, more visually accurate renditions of these garments in the tocapus of the Dumbarton Oaks tunic. Had a more precise visual representation of the uniform been required, Inca weavers certainly could have produced it. But even though the minute versions did not look exactly like the tunics they embodied, they were materially identical to them, having been woven with the same camelid-fiber threads. Even more impressively, they were woven and embroidered using the same techniques. Thus, beyond the reduced-scale tunic’s approximate visual representation of its referent, it enacted a very high degree of material and technical replication, that seems to have been considered more important to its act of signification and objecthood. The emphasis on materials in reduced-scale objects likely related to the Inca concept of camay—which Frank Salomon and George Urioste have translated as “to charge,” “to make,” and “to give form and force.”12 Through camay, objects were imbued with a generative, vivifying, lifeforce. For example, camay infused Inca rulers with the divine power of the sun, making them reduced-scale embodiments of it. When these Sapa Incas had their hair or fingernails cut, these fragments of their bodies continued to be animated by camay, which made it necessary to conserve them. The hair and fingernail clippings were used to create huauques, or reduced-scale embodiments of rulers. Camay also physically 401

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transferred the lifeforce of the emperors to the clothes they wore, making them unfit to be touched by others. When rulers died, camay was not extinguished, but continued to animate their desiccated flesh. Their hearts were supposedly invested in the Punchao, the gold idol of the sun. Camay empowered the metal Punchao with the lifeforce of the sun, through the material addition of the rulers’ hearts. As well, if the mummy of a ruler were burned, camay continued to render his ashes sacred. As this suggests, camay was not visible; it worked through materials. The visual, outward form of something could change, even as camay continued vitalizing it. Camay was seemingly the mechanism through which many scaled relationships were articulated, enabling material embodiments to exceed visual representation. Nonetheless, reduced-scale objects were just one subset of Inca material culture. While their existence may have been predicated on camay more than other objects, they highlight an attention to materials, materiality, and material identities that remains prominent in other Inca creations. Another ceramic in the Art Institute’s collection, also collected by Gaffron before 1912, represents a woman carrying an urpu on her back while breastfeeding a child (1955.2411). The vessel is notable because it shows ceramists within the Inca Empire did sometimes make complex, representational forms; there was not a moratorium on representation. But more important than the clay representation is the flow of liquid through it. Liquid poured into the mouth of the urpu apparently passes into the woman’s body and out a spout located by her feet. This makes the vessel a paccha, an object used by Incas in rituals celebrating fecundity through the movement of liquid. Moreover, Mary Weismantel’s work on Moche sex pots helpfully elucidates how the representation of breastfeeding implicates the act in this movement of nutritive fluid, conflating or analogizing the frothy white corn beer and breast milk as caloric, life-giving substances.13 Metalwork also reveals emic tenets of Inca art. However, vast quantities of gold and silver objects were melted down during the colonial period, making comprehensive studies difficult. Still, what survives shows how Incas tended to create objects from hammered sheet metal. Heather Lechtman has written evocatively on this technical approach, noting that when objects are cast they receive their shape from an external mold rather than the liquified gold. In contrast, the forms of hammered objects are determined by the metal itself and the manipulation of its mechanical properties as it is worked.14 Incas may have preferred to create hammered goldwork because of the way the artistic process emphasized the materiality of metal. Another hallmark of Andean metalworking is the preponderance of alloys, and the use of depletion surface metallurgy to remove the baser metal, usually copper, from the surface to enrich it with gold or silver. While this approach creates a richer-looking exterior, it could also be said to waste some quantity of the more noble metal within the object. However, Lechtman has suggested that Andean metalworkers likely considered it essential that the gold or silver be incorporated throughout the object, so that its surface manifested an inner essence.15 But as César Paternosto suggested, textiles were a major influence on Inca material culture and exemplified many of its dominant qualities. And no single object has shaped scholarly perceptions of Inca art more than the royal tunic conserved by Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC (see Figure 30.1). The vestment became the most famous object of Andean art because of attempts to identify visual representations in its motifs, called tocapus, in order to read them as glyphs from a long-lost Inca writing system. But their compositions

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Figure 30.1  Inca, All-Toqapu Tunic, 1450–1540 CE, 90.2  cm × 77.15  cm (35 1/2 in. × 30 3/8 in.), cotton and camelid fibers, PC.B.518 © Dumbarton Oaks, Pre-Columbian Collection, Washington, DC.

are more heavily influenced by the use of materials and techniques than the desire to achieve representational forms or visual designs. For example, the tunic’s tocapus have as many as seven columns, but only a maximum of three rows. The discrepancy in number is hard to explain from a visual standpoint but makes perfect sense when considering how the designs

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were woven. The weavers created the tunic sideways, so the tocapus with seven columns were woven as seven rows. One tocapu with bands of wavy lines created the illusion of complexity. The weaver only had to use one color of weft at a time. This made it one of the easiest tocapus to weave, and therefore it became one of the most numerous. In contrast, tocapus only had three rows because they actually had to be woven as columns. This meant that the weaver needed different threads for every separate section of color—and there was no advantage to weaving vertical stripes because the threads had to be carefully interlocked at vertical junctures between colors to avoid creating slits in the cloth. In a single tocapu, they might have had to simultaneously juggle some two dozen threads or more. Nonetheless, it is possible to discern how they structured the designs to reduce the number of threads they had to manipulate. Other tocapus also record how the act of making guided their forms. For example, a color might be employed in multiple places throughout a motif, such that the weaver could move a single thread from one area to another without having to load multiple needles with the same color simultaneously. This kind of recursive practice may well have generated many of the woven compositions. In other cases, the weaver swapped the placements of colors without altering the woven forms. This resulted in a shift in the tocapu’s chromatic appearance, but the weaver’s hand movements remained the same. Thus, the weavers of the tunic were not, perhaps, working to achieve forms that had been developed visually; rather, the motifs they created were shaped by the rational and regular movements of threads—repetitions, inversions, and parallelisms that generated a material logic. All the while, each thread had to be interlocked with its neighbors along vertical junctures to avoid gaps or slits. The result is an almost cellular network of bounded areas of colored threads, interlocking around their contours, thereby creating visual designs. In textiles, each discrete, sequential action completed by the weaver is explicitly recorded, thread by thread. But the ways that Inca weavers manipulated the fibers of the Dumbarton Oaks tunic can inform understandings of other forms of Inca artistic ­production—­particularly architecture. Just as Inca art has often been characterized as geometric and abstract, Inca stone walls have been described as unadorned because they lacked paint, murals, and friezes.16 But Inca masons used stones in building projects in ways that also emphasized the material over the visual. For example, Dennis Ogburn has impressively shown that the Incas quarried stones in the Cusco region and transported them to southern Ecuador.17 Certainly, there were other, nearer sources of stones, but these Cusqueñan stones likely transferred the material identity of the Inca capital to the regional capital they were building in the north. Although this huge effort would have resulted in a visual spectacle in its moment, it was expended in spite of the fact that, eventually, the relocated stones would have become visually indistinguishable from local ones. Modern scholars and onlookers have celebrated the visual qualities of one Inca ashlar— the famous 12-cornered stone of Calle Hatunrumiyoq in Cusco. Its very high number of angles draws attention to its contours. Indeed, as Carolyn Dean has noted, it has come to be regarded almost as an independent sculpture, as if it were not, in fact, integrated within a wall.18 However, Inca makers almost certainly did not set out to achieve its visual form in a preconceived way. Rather, as they carved and placed the stone, and carved and placed the other stones around it, they continually shaped and reshaped its contours as well as the

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Figure 30.2  Illustration of an Inca wall on Calle Inca Roca, Cusco, Peru. Drawing by the author.

contours of its neighbors. This process was most influenced by the unfinished shapes of the rocks that the masons chose to fill each successive void. Its form was created iteratively, by the forms of the other stones that came to about it, and their sequential effects on each other. There is ultimately little reason to think that its Inca makers held it in any special regard, visual or otherwise, relative to the other stones in the wall. The 12-angled stone holds a unique place in Inca art history. Remarkably, it has accrued its fame in spite of the fact that it is not thought to look like anything. Tourists may only have tolerance for one such stone, however—sightseers want to see things. Thus, as Carolyn Dean has also discussed, many Inca stones have come to be explained as figural representations in a manner like seeing animals in clouds. While living in Cusco in the early 2000s, I had the opportunity to witness this process unfold. Although crowds are always gathered around the 12-angled stone on Hatunrumiyoq, far fewer people turn the corner and go down the stairs to Calle Inca Roca. This was a problem for the shop owners there, who were related to a charismatic young boy named Silvestre, who sold finger puppets in the area with his older cousin Suzi. To lure tourists toward their relatives’ shop, Silvestre and Suzi developed the outline of a puma in the contours of the ashlars in the wall in front of it. One morning, in Jack’s Café, they brought me a drawing of the puma and asked what the English names were for parts of its body. That puma is still featured today on a sign at the doorway to the store. Looking back on this episode, I find it astounding that the desire to encounter representational imagery in Inca art is so strong that it was even apparent to young children, who, moreover, understood how readily it could be manipulated. While this stretch of wall might not look like this because of the visual influence of woven textile designs, there are significant artistic affinities between Inca tapestry weaving and masonry (see Figure 30.2). The compositions of tocapus were structurally transformed by the process of weaving and the hand manipulation of the materials. That same emphasis on materiality and manual process is apparent in the stones. Jean-Pierre Protzen extensively studied Inca building methods, especially how stones were laid.19 He recognized that the ways stones encroached upon each other, and the slopes of the joins

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between them, could be used to determine the order in which the ashlars were added. It is possible to reconstruct the sequence through which the would-be puma took shape, and to show how the overall form of the wall was iteratively transformed by the networked forms of the stones added to it, amounting to an artistic practice wherein the materials guided the making. Like weavers at a loom, the masons necessarily started from the bottom and worked their way up. Therefore, the first row of stones is justified along its bottom edge. However, the blocks have different shapes. Each appears to retain some degree of the i­ndividualized shape from when it was quarried—some bigger, some smaller—so the line created by their upper edges is more irregular. A number of the joins between them have a negative slope, seeming to suggest that the masons worked from left to right. Of course, the side-to-side directionality of work in tandem with upward progress is another phenomenon of ­weaving. In three places, however, the chosen stones were notably shorter than their neighbors. In  and of itself, this was apparently not a problem, or the masons would have selected other stones. Nonetheless, the masons sought to level out the row, so they augmented the heights of these shorter stones with half-row blocks. In these instances, we can understand that the ashlars took their shapes—not according to a preconceived visual plan that the masons hoped to achieve—but rather through negotiations between the upper edges of the laid stones and lower edges of the stones being laid. Their final shapes were a material compromise between the two. As the second row was laid, it seems like the masons started at the lowest points in the top of the first row on the left-hand side of the image. Because of the angles of its sides, this lowest stone had to be positioned before the stones on either side of it could be added. Those stones, however, ended up being taller than it—in essence preserving the depression from the row before. When the masons began the third row, they again started at the lowest points. On the left, they introduced a block that clearly was not tall enough for the row. Presumably, they could have selected a taller one. This suggests the masons appreciated how the repeated expressions of the stones’ individual forms created recurring depressions within the rows. Notably, they also did the same thing on the right. In both places, these shorter stones again needed half-row blocks to bring them up to the height of the third row, creating material echoes within the wall. Visually, these recurrences are not so apparent, like a colorful pattern repetition. And yet, these layered depositions of stones are akin to a weaver’s practice of laying row after row of weft into a loom, where the path and position of each thread is determined by the one beneath it. And just as weavers create patterns in cloth that were structurally comprised of interlocked joins between threads, masons similarly focused on the creation of junctures between stones, constructing a fractal network of fissures. These artistic congruencies between the finest Inca textiles and the finest Inca masonry seem not to be happenstance because, of course, both employ very specific artistic techniques: tapestry weaving and dry masonry. We must assume that makers consciously made these technical choices to shape the nature of Inca art. Inca art has often been discounted as less visually appealing than other ancient Andean artistic traditions because of its reduced emphasis on representational forms and tendency to feature geometric surface designs. It has even been alleged that Inca culture was somehow a simplification of earlier traditions. However, across different media and object types, Inca makers demonstrated a consistent interest in materiality and the material identities of

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the things they created. Inca art’s emphasis on substance, manual manipulation, and material forms perhaps suggests they developed a theoretical conception of objecthood that was different from what is typically assumed by Euro-American art historical studies of “the visual arts” or “visual culture.” Their nuanced and even somewhat esoteric conception of their material culture through its materials seems to have been strongly tied to the concept of camay in their intellectual tradition. A non-visual force that physically energized matter, camay necessarily influences how a discipline like art history must approach the study of Inca objects.

Notes 1 This issue has been notably examined by various scholars in the work of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. See, for example: Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, “Fashioning a Prince for All the World to See: Guaman Poma’s Self-Portraits in the Nueva Corónica,” The Americas, 75, no. 1: 47–94. 2 George Kubler, The Art and Architecture of Ancient America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 468. 3 Ibid., 468. 4 John Rowe, “Inca Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest,” in Handbook of South American Indians, ed. Julian H. Steward, vol 2 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, 1946), 287. 5 George Kubler, The Art and Architecture of Ancient America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 469. 6 Rebecca R. Stone, Art of the Andes from Chavín to Inca, 3rd ed. (New York: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2012), 16. Lisa Trever, Image Encounters: Moche Murals and Archaeo Art History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022), 20. 7 César Paternosto, The Stone & the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art, trans. Esther Allen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). 8 Geoffrey W. Conrad, “Inca Imperialism: The Great Simplification and the Accident of Empire,” in Ideology and Pre-Columbian Civilizations, ed. Arthur A. Demarest and Geoffrey W. Conrad (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1992), 159–174. 9 Carolyn Dean, “The Trouble with (The Term) Art,” The Art Bulletin, 65 (2006): 24–33. 10 Andrew Hamilton, Scale & the Incas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 11 See Donncha Kavanagh, “Ocularcentrism and its Others: A Framework for Metatheoretical Analysis,” Organization Studies, 25, no. 3 (2004): 445–464; Martin Jay, “The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism,” Poetics Today, 9, no. 2 (1988): 307–326. 12 Frank Salomon and George L. Urioste, The Huarochirí Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 45. Tamara L. Bray, “An Archaeological Perspective on the Andean Concept of Camaquen: Thinking Through Late PreColumbian Ofrendas and Huacas,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 19, no. 3 (2009): 358. 13 Mary Weismantel, “Moche Sex Pots: Reproduction and Temporality in Ancient South America,” American Anthropologist 106, no. 3 (September 2004): 495–505. 14 Heather Lechtman, “Cloth and Metal: The Culture of Technology,” in Andean Art at Dumbarton Oaks, edited By Elizabeth Hill Boone (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1996), 36. 15 Ibid., 41. 16 See, for example, Graziano Gasparini and Luise Margolies, Inca Architecture, trans. Patricia J. Lyon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 61, 320. 17 Dennis Ogburn, “Power in Stone: The Long-Distance Movement of Building Blocks in the Inca Empire,” Ethnohistory 51, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 101–135. 18 Carolyn Dean, A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 163–164. 19 Jean-Pierre Protzen, “Inca Quarrying and Stonecutting,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 44, no. 2 (May, 1985): 181.

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Selected Bibliography Conrad, Geoffrey W. “Inca Imperialism: The Great Simplification and the Accident of Empire,” in Ideology and Pre-Columbian Civilizations, ed. Arthur A. Demarest and Geoffrey W. Conrad, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1992, 159–174. Dean, Carolyn. “The Trouble with (The Term) Art,” The Art Bulletin, 65 (2006), 24–33. Dean, Carolyn. A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Gasparini, Graziano and Luise Margolies. Inca Architecture, trans. Patricia J. Lyon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Kubler, George. The Art and Architecture of Ancient America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Ogburn, Dennis. “Power in Stone: The Long-Distance Movement of Building Blocks in the Inca ­Empire,” Ethnohistory, 51:1 (Winter 2004), 101–135. Paternosto, César. The Stone & the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art, trans. Esther Allen. ­Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

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31 DEBILITY AND THE ETHICS OF PROXIMITY Spatial and Temporal Immediacy in the Work of Candice Lin Hentyle Yapp The enactment of decolonization is often imagined as emerging from an authentic, knowable space or past that provides a blueprint to exist otherwise. Some nostalgically turn to the nonWest or a historical moment to discover and produce decolonial possibilities. However, many have cautioned against ossifying and romanticizing the space and time of the pre- and decolonial. For instance, Evren Savci pinpoints the “decolonial expectations of the Global South” so as to highlight the burdens placed upon the Global South to be the alternative space to ensure or model decolonization.1 She helpfully locates and complicates the “unspoken equation of language = culture = difference = decolonial.”2 In addition, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui names the romanticization of pre-settler times, as a history that comes to be evacuated of gendered difference and idealized as decolonial possibility. And from an earlier moment in transnational feminist discourse, Gayatri Spivak reminds us of how “a nostalgia for lost origins can be detrimental to the exploration of social realities within the critique of imperialism.”3 In light of these critical insights, decolonization as a movement and concept struggles with how to conceptualize time and place as authentic markers, nostalgic origins, and alternative examples for how to live. Further, when we understand this problem within our context of late liberalism, the urgency of this question comes to the fore. These forms of historical and geographic difference often come to satiate a thirst for increased representation and knowledge about the other without substantive structural change. Thus, examples from the Global South and pre-settler times sit uncomfortably within a late liberal context that merely takes these examples at a remove, as flattened examples to learn more about the other. A focus on difference could offer but is often not taken as providing methods and the means to restructure, remedy, and redistribute toward remediating uneven global realities and histories. When geographic and historical difference function only as epistemological correctives that increase our knowledge or create more empathy toward the other, late liberalism furthers its reach and logic. However, there are many seeking to rethink the purpose, role, and function of difference for the decolonial beyond a late liberal project. This chapter grapples with how we turn to temporal and spatial otherness, without them becoming removed examples that replicate liberal violence by merely producing more knowledge about and increasing the representation of the other. How can displays of otherness not be burdened with being the authentic alternatives for decolonial futures 409

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or cathected with nostalgic desire? I focus on how these objects of otherness come to be understood as spatially removed and temporally distanced to highlight how time and space are the metaphors that structure our very understandings of difference. Time and space become the matrixes by which otherness comes to be sustained. Difference is placed at a remove temporally, in the past, so to create distance from the present. Difference is placed at a remove spatially, the elsewhere, so to make it appear that the other’s problems are not akin to nor directly intertwined with those at home. This chapter turns to the aesthetic methods that rework space and time, making them immediate, near, close, and in proximity beyond a liberal project of increasing knowledge about others in the world and in history. In particular, I explore how Candice Lin’s work affords a rethinking of space and time through questions surrounding debility, aesthetics, and coloniality. This, in turn, produces an ethical project for decolonization that shifts from one involving empathy for the other and expands beyond late liberal knowledge production. Lin does not merely display temporal and geographic difference to further an epistemological project—one that increases the representation of difference for purposes of our knowledge about otherness. Furthermore, rather than presenting historical and non-Western counterexamples for our colonized present, Lin directs us to the ethical, which catalyzes changes in how we live and furthers a decolonial project in the present. The ethical implicates each of us in the enduring legacies and manifestations of coloniality and requires that we change how we exist, consume, and relate (Figure 31.1).

Figure 31.1  Candice Lin, Birth of a Nation, 2008.  Watercolor and ink on paper, 52 × 44 inches (132 × 112 cm). Courtesy of the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery. Photo: Joshua White.

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This chapter thus explores how artists like Lin play with temporality and space to produce a different relation to coloniality that is not one of remove. Instead of remove, Lin contends with time and space to be nearby and immediate in order for people to viscerally feel the urgency of past violence and the proximity of uneven global dynamics. Otherness thereby becomes not examples to study and learn about; instead, their details and contours become ways to revise the way we strive toward a decolonial project. In other words, artists like Lin use difference as a method and approach that suggest a change in how we live. The space and time of the decolonial are not imagined as nostalgic sites of counter-existence; instead, Lin renders the time and space of the other to invite us to change how we exist in the present. Decolonization becomes palpable in the immediate moment rather than solely an aspiration or mere rhetoric. By focusing on ethics and decolonization, I avoid attributing a full sense of agency to the artist and her work; instead, I propose here that we must linger in the work’s aesthetics to articulate a less forceful idea of agency for the project of decolonization. Certainly, the artwork is entwined with the complexities of the global art market. Thus, the import of this analysis is to think with art within this larger condition, rather than merely arguing for or against art’s agency or attempting to romantically produce an artist or art object that exists in purity, untainted by capital. In other words, I write with and through art as always imbricated within the conditions of modernity, whereby it becomes impossible to romanticize art as purely outside the political or untainted by the problems of our world. In order to produce such an ethical project, the aesthetics of artists like Lin, however, do not usually translate nor are immediately legible as literal or direct critique. These approaches are less didactic and operate at the minor level of changing our senses, logics, and assumptions surrounding not only colonial power but also decolonization itself. In this way, these aesthetics resonate with what Tobin Siebers names as a disability aesthetic: “disability as a critical framework … questions the presuppositions underlying definitions of aesthetic production and appreciation.”4 The import of disability aesthetics is that they move us away from understanding disability as solely about an authentic subject or identity. This is not to discount the import of subjective experience; rather, disability aesthetics further a decolonial project that expands an understanding of difference beyond the individual and toward longer temporal and broader geographic arcs that help restructure how the world operates. These aesthetics, in other words, describe a method and way of highlighting the dominant assumptions and limits surrounding what we understand to be of worth and value. In this way, disability aesthetics serve as a decolonial praxis in that they do not suture an authentic subject, time, or space with a particular project. Instead, disability becomes an analytic by which to decolonize the dominant presumptions around what we have historically understood as aesthetics, which ultimately indexes how and what we value. Thus, disability aesthetics are not only about artists who identify as disabled but also “force us to reconsider fundamental aesthetic assumptions and to embrace another aesthetics.”5 Lin’s work resonates with another aesthetics through debility. In brief, her attention to non-normative bodies and an aesthetics of the incomplete amplify Siebers’ disability aesthetics. In particular, much of Birth of a Nation remains sketched with ink, while watercolor vividly animates convulsing bodies within the colonial imaginary. By shifting away from a purely identity-based notion of disability, the field has thus provided the means to think less about single subjects and more about populations—less about ossifying notions like subject, space, and time as authentic indexes and more about expanding what these terms can do. Disability studies has shifted to focus on the biopolitical 411

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contours of disability, particularly within a transnational context. This work has, more specifically, developed the notion of debility to amplify and complicate how the Global South has come to be discussed. Rather than being rendered as the space of true decolonial possibility, the Global South has come to show us the enduring and present effects of imperialism and colonialism. Through debility, the Global South is understood as not expanding our knowledge about non-Western spaces. Instead, debility affords an account of the “international division of labor” that constructs how these populations come to be debilitated through warfare and capitalist extraction.6 Lin’s work does not locate a specific location in the Global South to exemplify the ills of colonization. Instead, she produces a generic space that highlights the violences enacted upon Indigenous bodies and environments in order to understand the Global South as a relational concept. Although Lin meticulously researches specific histories surrounding Indigeneity, the Caribbean, and plant life, her aesthetics and focus on the Global South produce an effect that is not solely connected to one specific location.7 Similar to her use of a disability aesthetics, Lin’s focus on a generic space as relational is meant to shift away from displaying the true, documentarian, or ethnographic realities of a single subject or locale. Instead, she uses disability and space as methods to highlight the conditions of modernity, coloniality, and capital. Disability studies’ accounts of aesthetics and debility illuminate a critical conceptual shift to grapple with how the Global South as a space and pre-settler histories as a temporal moment come to function for decolonial discourse. Disability serves as a method that helps us understand the normative foundations of our world, particularly in relation to the non-West. As such, when debility and decolonization are theorized together, we develop a dynamic approach that contends with the problem of rendering otherness in space and time as the romanticized possibilities for decolonization. This chapter first examines Lin’s work to reveal how it helps us trace through debility as a discourse to reconsider space. I then focus on Lin’s work to grapple with decolonization as it relates to time. Lin’s artwork is certainly an amalgamation of space and time. However, for purposes of argumentation, I disaggregate them to articulate the import of producing different relations to geography/ space and history/time that move beyond each as fully knowable. I end this chapter with what these shifts afford for a different ethical orientation in how we approach the space of the Global South and the time of the decolonial beyond static, knowable entities—what I call an ethics of proximity.

The Space of Debility Candice Lin is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist. Lin often turns to the space of the transnational. However, rather than following a late liberal logic, this artist’s focus on the transnational does not aim to expand our knowledge about others in the world. Further, her focus on a global space does not fetishize the Global South as pure decolonial possibility. Instead, her work deploys the space of the Global South to understand how populations and space come to be produced through questions surrounding objecthood, racial capital, and circulation. Her art often studies the material history of colonial objects like porcelain and cochineal to illuminate how power constructs transnational space. In other words, Lin uses space to further a decolonial project that shows us the uneven structures of power at hand, showing our own relation and participation in the problems of the world. In Birth of a Nation (2008), the artist uses watercolor and ink on paper to trace the contours of the colonial encounter. The majority of the 44″ × 52″ drawing consists of sketches 412

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of plants and bodies. With light tones of gray, brown, and forest green, Lin depicts a psychedelic landscape, as impressions of branches, plant and animal life, and leaves awash the canvas. There are a few plants, rocks, animals, and tree limbs that are colored in with detail, as the artist chooses to animate specific aspects of nature with her pen and brush. Bodies are similarly brought into relief with vivid detail. Their skin is colored in with fleshy tones that range from pale white to tan. However, these bodies are not posing in stances of proper bourgeois comportment nor dressed in clothing. In the top right corner of the work, naked bodies are depicted in viscerally suggestive ways: a chorus of primarily women dance in ecstasy with a figure in the center whose body has remnants of cuts and blood. In the lower left corner, there is a scene of a shocked figure giving birth. The fetus’ head is quite detailed and emerges from the pubic area of the screaming individual. There are also scenes of cannibalism, as bodies topple upon one another. Amid this, a baby stumbles. Rather than providing a documentary-like portrayal of the violences of the colonial encounter, the artist depicts the scene of encounter as purposefully violent, erotic, and complex. Lin seems to choose to fill in bodies and nature akin to the colonial imagination, whereby some bodies and animal/plant life come to be animated to varying degrees by how they are perceived, particularly along lines surrounding race, gender, ability, age, and sexuality. Further, the title indexes how Lin refers less to colonized subjects and more to the production of the nation, the state-form amid the colonial encounter. The generic colonized space/nation demonstrates how it comes to be filled and used according to colonial whims and desires. Lin literalizes how the colonial imagination animates objects, bodies, and things. Certainly, Lin’s title references the infamous 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith. The film extols the virtues of the Ku Klux Klan, as the group is depicted as a necessity to protect women and maintain a system of values informed by white supremacy and misogyny. This silent film was the first ever to be screened at the White House and is heralded for its technological innovations. The reference to Griffith’s film does not make Lin’s work to be about a specific space like the Americas. Rather, Lin develops parallels surrounding the violent logics of conquest as they manifest across space and time. The colonial imagination operates across multiple spaces by targeting racialized bodies, normalizing constructions of gender, and extracting from and devastating the environment. Lin captures the effects of this imagination across space and geographies. Further, the film and this drawing resonate in ways that illustrate how the production of the world emerges through questions surrounding not only race but also gender. The biopolitics of nation-state formation involve the entwinement of race with gender to manage populations. For Griffith’s film, the racial project in the US is buttressed and rationalized by the protection of white womanhood. For Lin’s drawing, women are central to the racial project of the colonial encounter. In addition, Lin focuses on plant and animal life to illustrate what comes to be valued or considered medicine and science based upon the rejection of gendered knowledge production. In other words, Lin emphasizes the necessity of a generic colonized nation to highlight these complex entwinements that span multiple spaces and histories. Lin situates her work in relation to the visual traditions in the Americas surrounding the depiction of Indigenous and racialized bodies through subhuman and subjugated forms. Rather than merely countering these with more humane or positive images for the Americas, she focuses on a generic and unwieldy space akin to Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Further, Lin centers how bodies enter a normalized axis surrounding proper and improper comportment. This resonates with a disability aesthetics that emphasize how these 413

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bodies and populations come to be differentially valued against the production of idealized national bodies. In other words, Lin shows the space of debility to illustrate a different use for the transnational that brings the violences of the past and present closer, nearer, and more proximate. For example, many of the bodies in Lin’s drawing are not depicted as rational beings—they gyrate, dance, scream, and flail in ways that exist outside of bourgeois comportment and rationality. One could stretch this to be about and to represent disability as it relates to cognition. I resist this urge in order to emphasize how Lin reveals the operations of colonization to illustrate the colonial imagination that sutures race, gender, sexuality, and disability. In other words, Lin deploys a disability aesthetic that reveals what constructs our sensibilities and assumptions about the world. Further, she turns to the analytic of debility to reveal how violence constructs the space of the Global South. Debility has become a key frame to expand the field beyond solely questions around identity, representation, and empowerment. Building off of the work of Julie Livingston, Jasbir Puar develops debility to understand disability as “a product—not byproduct but a deliberate product—of exploitative labor conditions, racist incarceration and policing practices, militarization, and other modes of community disenfranchisement.”8 In other words, debility helps us understand disability and the transnational not as subjects or spaces to learn more about the other. Instead, they direct us to how these populations and spaces come to be produced out of warfare, colonialism, and other related forms of dispossession that are enacted by the power of the state and driven by our own practices of consumption. Debility is a concept that emphasizes, similar to Lin’s aesthetics, how difference must always be thought through and with state power and social structures. The title Birth of a Nation directs us to this critical aspect of debility as a discourse. In turn, debility enables us to understand why we focus on different geographic spaces beyond merely learning about the other. Debility affords an analytic that brings such spaces closer and more immediate, as they are produced through extraction and consumption. In this vein, debility marks a critical spatial line, what scholars like Gayatri Spivak and others, call the international (gendered) division of labor. In Spivak’s famous essay, she asks, “On the other side of the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text, can the subaltern speak?”9 This international division reveals how debility undergirds the populations that separate the West from the rest. The rest exists amid this line as populations are often debilitated due to colonization, war, capitalist demands, and imperial conquest. The space of the transnational, in other words, is not merely meant to expand our understanding of others in the world. Further, Lin renders this dividing line transparent, allowing us to understand the coloniality of academic thought that often takes the US and Europe as accepted norms. And rather than simply remedy Eurocentrism by expanding our geographic purview, debility and a focus on this division of labor turn to the non-West to produce a radically different project. This project emphasizes the political urgency of grappling with the transnational in ways that implicate ourselves and make immediate the conditions and problems of the present. Lin’s debility aesthetics, in other words, amplify debility by highlighting this international dividing line as it relates to the violence of colonialism and capitalist extraction. Such an aesthetic approach renders the non-West and sites of colonization palpable; these multiple spaces become less about ethnographic knowledge and more about making the historical and contemporary violences of power visceral, real, and nearby. 414

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The Time of Decoloniality Lin’s work develops the idea of decolonization not only through the debility of a transnational context but also the historicity of colonization. The past is rendered palpable and less at a remove. Rather than trying to accurately portray and document history, Lin makes historical colonization and its violences visceral, felt, and immediate. She asks us to feel the time of decolonization viscerally. Rather than trying to produce a sense of an authentic, idyllic past to enact decolonial possibility, Lin uses time and history to feel colonization’s effects so as to have it become immediate and not at a remove. Formally, Lin depicts the colonial encounter with a light touch rather than a heavy hand. Her lines sketch colonial violence; however, she uses color to not only lightly gesture towards but also highlight and emphasize these moments. Even amid this light touch, she uses splashes of subdued color to display certain details in order to bring our attention toward a set of convulsing, jolting bodies. The bodies of dancing women, along with the scene of a head emerging out of a body, are filled in, as if to remind us of their immediacy, even amid the temporal remove of history. The formal effect of detailing nature and bodies is meant to render colonial violence as it relates to race, gender, sexuality, and debility visceral and ­immediate—the colors literally highlight past moments of encounter to render them palpable. These bodies are formally made visceral. Lin’s work, in other words, operates akin to what Neetu Khanna calls the visceral logics of decolonization. Drawing from the work of Frantz Fanon, Khanna reminds us of the need to contend with decolonization at not only the structural apparatus of the state but also the level of the “affective trauma of colonization.”10 She locates the import of the visceral “as a logic of decolonization”—the space that “interanimates the energies of both colonized and revolutionary affects … imbued with the potentiality of a radical affective reconstitution.”11 The visceral becomes the space in which to activate the immediacy and urgency of the past. Lin depicts bodies that literally flail, shake, grab, bite, dance, move, convulse, hit, scream, and gyrate while giving birth, puking, drooling, and stumbling. Lin traces what Khanna describes as the “energetic dynamic that reverberates between two bodies, animating and activating racialized repositories in automated response.”12 The repository and memory of the past are animated with and through the visceral, as these “involuntary bodily responses archive and automatize a deep and violent history of colonial subjugation.”13 The flailing of the bodies in Lin’s work literalizes the visceral as it relates to the history of colonization. Lin aestheticizes historical time in order to bring it into the present. Through the immediacy of the visceral, Lin renders the “somatic unconscious” legible.14 In this way, the present tense of the body is felt to be immediate, which does not mean such bodies are without or outside of history. Instead, the presence of the body and the repetition of visceral reactions emerge from the history of colonization. These bodies are not rendered equivalent and universalist in form. Rather, the colonial encounter centers a focus on the past in order to trace the import of racialization, gender, and debility for the production of subjects. Indeed, the visceral violence of colonization requires an account of multiple axes of difference so as to avoid romanticizing pre-settler pasts as idyllic, romantic, and full of decolonial possibility. The visceral helps make this history ever-present, nearby, and in proximity by accounting for not some distant ideal past that remains untainted before colonization. This pre-history to colonization is one that is always already racialized, gendered, and normed. The temporality of pre-settler time, in other words, is felt and understood as always 415

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already imbricated by and with social difference and social structure. Lin’s work resonates with Kauanui by arguing for an understanding of decolonization, pre-settler existence, and the past as imbricated with and through questions of gender and sexuality. As Kauanui reminds us, it is an error to understand “that prior to British and Euro-American colonialism, Native Hawaiian culture was egalitarian, not patriarchal.”15 Rather, through viscerality, Lin demonstrates how the ontological grounds of the past are situated across multiple forms of difference. Lin illustrates what Khanna describes as the way [S]cenes of somatic vitality expose decolonization—the transformation of racialized consciousness—as inextricable from the disruptive and nonnormative forms of gender and sexuality precisely because it is where visceral logics misbehave (where the vitality of the somatic unconscious is most vividly at work) that the possibilities of decolonization are imagined.16 In this way, the temporal past is not merely something to learn about or becomes the authentic space for decolonial possibility. Rather, we grapple with the problems at the heart of not only settler time but also pre-settler existence.

The Ethics of Proximity Lin’s work deploys time and space not as authentic sites for decolonial possibility. In addition, her work refuses to merely present the space of the non-West and the time of pre-­colonial existence as examples to increase the representation of otherness in and our knowledge about the world. Instead, she uses debility to render space to be held less at a remove and more immediate to our lives. And she deploys the viscerality of past violences to become proximate and close to us. Her work draws in the space and time of the other, demanding an ethical change in the ways we live rather than a purely empathic connection or care for an other. I conclude here with the ethical in order to move away from empathy as the end game and the dominant approach for focusing on the space of the non-West and the history of otherness. An empathic connection can certainly be the start of an ethical encounter; however, it is the visceral jolt into changing one’s behavior and actions where the empathic shifts into the ethical. The value in focusing on difference (spatially and temporally) has typically been to expand our understanding of otherness so as to improve our ideas about the world and reckon with historical violence. However, inherent in such turns is an overreliance on empathy to teach us and see the other as human and equal. This project when siloed away from ethics, however, furthers a late liberal logic of extraction that flattens minoritarian difference to be at a remove so that examples of difference merely become distanced things to learn about. When empathy turns into ethical change, we then deploy minoritarian difference for a decolonial project that rethinks how we exist, consume, and relate. When one ends with the path of empathy, one only enters a relation of liberal recognition with the other. However, when this path extends and converges with the ethical, one produces an account of the self in relation to the other. Such an accounting changes and challenges how one lives and exists in relation to others. The ethics produced through proximity do not simply teach us about the other and recognize their existence. Instead, the ethics of proximity produces discomfort so it viscerally changes us—shakes us out of our patterned ways. Through this, we alter how we consume and engage the environment 416

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and others, and we also contend with how to relinquish property and land interests and privileges (be they unevenly distributed in the first place). Through decolonization, debility, and viscerality, Lin allows us to sense an ethics of proximity that brings time/history and space/the transnational to be closer, more immediately felt, and nearby. In turn, this visceral proximity shifts how we exist and act in ways that decolonize, redistribute, and engage differently. In other words, these projects grapple with the international division of labor. This line is both spatial and temporal. It is geographically drawn in ways that correspond to First and Third Worlds, and it is also temporally rendered such that the history of racial capital has repeatedly extracted from across geographies. As such, when the international division of labor becomes the starting point, rather than something merely to include or consider, we begin to enact a different ethical orientation to the space and time of the Global South and to decolonization. The ethics of proximity do not operate through forms of liberal inclusion and recognition. These ethics demand a change toward decolonization and redistribution. Liberalism is not fundamentally premised on a decolonial or redistributive project; its emphases on compromise and the individual subject’s development foreclose a radical project of revolutionary change. Meanwhile, the ethics of proximity enable a decolonial and Marxist project of redistribution that revises and restructures how we live in the present and toward the future. These ethics force us to viscerally feel distant pasts and spaces less as decolonial answers and more as the vibrant jolting realities that shift how we relate. Lin’s work functions in this way by bringing time and space to be felt more immediately—less as the means to produce only empathy for the other and more as the means to sense how we are implicated in and actively further the problems and conditions of the present. In this way, Lin’s work focuses on subaltern pasts and spaces to enact what Spivak identifies as the need to confront otherness: we engage “the subsistence farmers, unorganized peasant labor, the tribals and communities of zero workers on the street or in the countryside,” in order to “not represent them but to learn to represent ourselves.”17 Decolonization, in other words, requires that we implicate and bring ourselves closer in proximity to the spaces and times of colonization. It is through the entwinement of debility and decoloniality that we can begin to understand the aesthetic as drawing time and space into our proximity, demanding that we change how we exist, consume, and relate.

Notes 1 Evren Savci, Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 4. 2 Savci, Queer in Translation, 4. 3 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988), 87. 4 Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 3. 5 Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 3. 6 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 69. 7 Anuradha Vikram, “Candice Lin’s Garden of Earthly Delights,” 18th Street Arts, last accessed September 30, 2021, https://18thstreet.org/candice-lins-garden-of-earthly-delights/ 8 Jasbir, Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 65. 9 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 78. 10 Neetu Khanna, The Visceral Logics of Decolonization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 2. 11 Khanna, The Visceral Logics, 3.

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Hentyle Yapp 12 Khanna, The Visceral Logics, 7. 13 Khanna, The Visceral Logics, 7. 14 Khanna, The Visceral Logics, 4. 15 J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “Native Hawaiian Decolonization and the Politics of Gender.” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2008): 283. 16 Khanna, The Visceral Logics, 30. 17 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 84.

Selected Bibliography Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani. “Native Hawaiian Decolonization and the Politics of Gender.” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2008): 81–87. Khanna, Neetu. The Visceral Logics of Decolonization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Puar, Jasbir. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Savci, Evren. Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics Under Neoliberal Islam. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, 66–111. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988. Vikram, Anuradha. “Candice Lin’s Garden of Earthly Delights.” 18th Street Arts. Last accessed September 30, 2021. https://18thstreet.org/candice-lins-garden-of-earthly-delights/

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32 DECOLONIZING CROCODILES, REPATRIATING BIRDS Human-Animal Relations in the Indian Landscape Tamara Sears In their influential 2012 article, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang drew attention to the metaphorization of decolonization, asserting that such discourse enables a set of evasions, or “moves to innocence,” that “problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity.”1 In this schema, the adoption of the term to describe a wider range of anti-imperial struggles creates a “convenient ambiguity between decolonization and social justice work” through which reparations can be seen as a way of redressing the systemic inequalities enacted upon groups minoritized by the settler nation-state. Such systems of reparations, they argue, attempt to rescue a settler future without truly dismantling the hierarchical structures built through centuries of settler-colonialism. By contrast, decolonization requires a full return of “stolen resources” and a radical reconstitution of native geographies through the return of historically seized land to its original, Indigenous occupants. It also requires an epistemological shift away from the very idea of land as property, making repatriation, and not reparation, fundamental to the project of decolonization.2 This chapter turns to the question of what it might mean to think about decolonization, in both real and metaphoric senses, through a different type of lens, one that focuses not on indigenous human but on non-human animals that have been subject to systematic displacement, in many cases almost to the brink of extinction, with particularly dire consequences in formerly colonized nations. I take as my case study a vast stretch of wilderness in central India, south of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, which today is subsumed by the modern-day state of Madhya Pradesh. Heralded for its dense forests, Madhya Pradesh is home to 24 wildlife sanctuaries, 12 national parks, and three biosphere reserves covering an area of nearly 11,000 square kilometers that harbors dozens of rare and endangered species.3 Under British colonialism, most of Madhya Pradesh fell within the domain of Princely States rather than direct rule. Like many Princely States, it did not experience high rates of urbanization and industrial development, and its economy remained largely agrarian.4 The same remains true today. Whereas the state government has been attempting to generate revenue by promoting agricultural investment, the national government has been working to greenlight a controversial river linking project aimed at expanding irrigation, with potentially devastating environmental consequences.5 Couched in highly nationalist rhetoric, both projects have generated criticism from environmental activists voicing concerns that 419

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the felling of forests and flooding of land will severely endanger the already dwindling biodiversity in the region, witnessed through the rapid decline of endangered species, particularly in the past 20 years. The idea of human control over the natural world is rooted in colonial institutions and their restructuring of knowledge, which profited from the centering of human subjectivity and objectification of non-human entities in ways that were fundamentally disconnected from earlier Indic understandings of human relationships with nature.6 Thus, decolonizing the non-human requires an act of decentering in order to equalize frameworks of humannature relations. In this project, both the contemporary artist and the art historian have significant agency. On the one hand, as a disciplinary practice, art history has the ability to mobilize visual materials, to contextualize them historically, and to challenge conceptions that have been naturalized in the present day. On the other, artists can make efficacious interventions that force larger publics to engage with nature in new ways.7 This chapter plays with both of these ideas, demonstrating the potential of both historical research and visual praxis to complicate hierarchies of power and reframe the relationship between humans and nature in new ways. I draw from the field of historical ecology, which combines approaches from history, anthropology and geography, and make a case for the utility of art history as a tool for historicizing nature and imagining more ethical futures.8 I draw upon a range of sources, both visual and literary, to recover lost presences and to draw attention to the effects of colonial and postcolonial development. I look to precolonial sources in order to decolonize the present, to unsettle entrenched perceptions of human-animal relations, and to make visible the magnitude of what continues to be lost. Although the act of decolonizing nature in the sense suggested by Tuck and Yang is ultimately an unachievable reality, both art history and artistic practice offer ways of decolonizing narratives, of bringing together the material and representational effects of the Anthropocene, and highlighting the ongoing experience of empire as carried on through the postcolonial nation-state.9

Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Failures of Conservation In his influential 2016 book, The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh argued that the ongoing climate crisis today has a distinctly Asian future, one that hinges on the consumption of fossil fuels by large populations in India and China.10 However, Asia is central to not only the future but also to past histories of the mobilization of global capital that began transforming human relationships with nature on an unprecedented scale. While many locate the origins of the problem in nineteenth century, in the Industrial Revolution, Europeans were already registering the profound environmental effects of agricultural expansions and exploitation of forest resources in colonized places by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Especially visible was the effect of agrarian activity on exotic species, such as the dodo, whose disappearance from the island of Mauritius was due to the expansion of colonial sugar cane plantations and timber industries under the first the Dutch, and then the French and British.11 Although the environmental effects of imperial expansion fueled new conservationist movements in Europe, the forces of global capitalism continued to push back.12 Vividly produced posters and photographs featuring exoticized landscapes, wild animals and agrarian products were produced to generate public desire for commodities and to emphasize, for investors, both the imperial possession of land and its potential for cultivation and natural resource extraction, even as the exploitation of human labor was frequently effaced.13 420

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The close connection between the human and non-human animal costs of colonization has been more recently captured by scholars through the concept of the plantationocene, which links exploitations of labor, forced migrations of slaves and indentured laborers, and the dehumanization of racialized Indigenous communities to the global expansion of plantation systems.14 In South Asia, histories of conservation were often in tension with economic development through both colonial and postcolonial eras. Under the British, the need to balance profit with preservation shaped many policies in areas that are today India and Pakistan. Forest management was a particular concern for the British, not only as a source of timber but also as fuel for the expanding network of railways needed to transport raw materials and goods from inland areas to the coastal ports for overseas shipping. As a result, the British established distinctive policies and took on the task of training special officers, both native and British, to ensure the protection of the forests and implemented strict control over the extraction of timber and other forest produce.15 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the devastating effects of famine caused by deforestation and the mishandling of land circulated widely through photographs and reports that elicited widespread global condemnation.16 Following the departure of the British in 1947, the government led a push towards industrialization as a way of modernizing the nation and increasing India’s ability to compete on a global arena. This came partly at the expense of India’s environment.17 By the 1960s, the increasing threat to biodiversity spurred activists to push for new measures to protect wildlife and slow processes of deforestation. In the 1970s, environmentalism became central to policy, resulting in the 1972 passing of Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act. In 1976, the introduction of two new articles to the constitution made it the responsibility of both the state and all citizens to protect and improve the natural environment and to safeguard wildlife. Since then, legal decisions have made critical distinctions between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, asserting that human interests should not be prioritized over those of nonhuman animals.18 Nevertheless, in practice, agrarian expansion continues to encroach upon natural habitats, and rapid urbanization coupled with the global construction industry’s growing need for building materials has expanded mining for stone and the stripping of rivers for sand.19 Often, the discourse promoting agrarian expansion reveals the inheritance of colonial structures and epistemologies by the postcolonial nation, as governmental agencies deploy rhetorics of national growth and development to justify the transformation of common land into private property, often at the expense of both endangered non-human animals and marginalized human communities.20

Carnivorous Beasts and Wilderness Landscapes Both the present-day promotion of Madhya Pradesh’s open lands as a welcoming resource for agrarian investment and the national government’s efforts to control the flow of its rivers are at odds with premodern perceptions of the wilderness as a dangerous landscape. Although Madhya Pradesh has been home to stalwart hilltop fortresses and large temple towns, much of its vast geography historically constituted the formidable aranya, or wilderness, overseen by local chiefs, bandits, and carnivorous beasts.21 In traveling through the region in the 1340s, the Moroccan Ibn Battuta claims to have been kidnapped by bandits and held captive in a forest cave. He also describes the landscape as overrun by tigers, that 421

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were not always confined to the forests.22 While stopping at Narwar Fort, for example, locals warned him of a tiger known to sneak into the fortress at night, to enter into houses, and to drag sleeping victims from their beds. In one instance, an unwitting wedding guest was mauled after stepping away momentarily from the celebrations to “relieve nature.” In this case, Ibn Battuta’s tale reflects not only a permeability between human and non-human animal habitats but also their ontological interdependence as Narwar’s tiger was revealed eventually to be, in fact, an evil, shape-shifting yogi, with the magical ability to take on the bodily form of a tiger.23 That tigers dwelt in close proximity to human settlements is reinforced through an earlier eighth-century Sanskrit-language play by the court poet, Bhavabhuti, in which a circus tiger breaks out of his cage and causes carnage in the city of Padmavati (present-day Pawaya), just downstream from what would later become the fortress at Narwar.24 The danger remained pressing also much later, in 1561, when the Mughal Emperor Akbar accidentally disturbed a female tiger with her cubs while wandering the forests near Narwar Fort. As described by his court biographer, Abu’l Fazl, while Akbar was able to quickly slay the tigress, his companions struggled to subdue her offspring. A double-folio illustration from the Akbarnama (ca. 1590–1595) captures the scene in elaborate detail, emphasizing both Akbar’s prowess and the bloody struggle.25 While the forests were dominated by tigers, India’s many rivers presented new potential threats in the form of the crocodile. Among the most iconic of the subcontinent’s many crocodilian subspecies was the impressive ghariyal (gavialis gangeticus), which, at maturity, could reach anywhere between 16 and 20 feet in length. Once ubiquitous in the landscape, the ghariyal is listed as critically endangered and faces a real possibility of becoming extinct today, despite efforts to create sanctuaries, particularly in Madhya Pradesh.26 Its numbers have declined by over 80% in the past few generations, and its current population is estimated at less than 250 breeding adults.27 Although the initial decline was linked to hunting, the larger threat has been the destruction of its habitat through the construction of dams and artificial embankments, the proliferation of irrigation canals, and sand mining along riverbeds, which remain the ghariyal’s preferred nesting grounds. A peculiar-looking crocodile with an elongated and bulbous snout, the ghariyal, in its most ancient formations, was a creature associated variously with Kama, the god of love, and with sacred waters. Most significantly, it served as an inspiration for the makara, the aquatic companion (vahana) to the river goddess Ganga, the Ganges River personified, whose image became a fixture on temple doorframes by the mid-first millennium (see ­Figure 32.1).28 The historical abundance of the ghariyal in both the Ganges and Yamuna rivers and their central Indian tributaries is attested to through historic sources, among the more significant of which is the Baburnama, or the memoirs of Babur, the first Mughal emperor. Among his many close observations of flora and fauna, Babur provides an account of the ghariyal as a large and formidable creature, approximately four or five yards long, and “as big around as a sheep.” 29 He warns that they were known to be dangerous, having killed an enslaved woman and at least three or four soldiers. In truth, the ghariyal is not one of the more dangerous crocodilian species as their slender jaw is suited better for feasting on small fish in the water than for attacking humans on land. Nonetheless, illustrated versions of the Baburnama frequently emphasize the ghariyal’s daunting presence. In a ca. 1590 folio now at the British Library, the artist has captured the ghariyal to dramatic effect, emphasizing its peculiar bulbous snout as its defining feature but endowing it with sharp fangs, a lolling tongue, and red whiskers (see Figure 32.2). Another folio, dated to ca. 422

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Figure 32.1  River Goddess Ganga, standing on a makara (crocodile), Besnagar, Madhya Pradesh, Central India, c. 405–415 CE, sandstone (MFA Boston, Accession no. 26.26).

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Figure 32.2  ‘Crocodile (gavialus gangeticus),’ Detail of a folio from The Memoirs of Babur, ­1590–1593. London, British Library, Or. 3714 Vol.4 f.394v. (c) The British Library Board. By permission of the British Library.

1598, depicts a similarly menacing beast rising from the water amidst a group of boats, its advances held at bay only by a pair of armed musketeers.30 While artists took liberties to infuse drama into paintings of ghariyal-infested waters, the accuracy of their representations suggests a first-hand familiarity with the species. This is in contrast to other types of crocodiles, whose comparative ferocity may have presented limited opportunities for close observation by artists in the late sixteenth century. Among the most notable is the mugger crocodile (Crocodylus palustris), designated as a sherabi, or “water-tiger,” which Babur described as resembling a lizard and powerful enough to carry off both men and oxen.31 Painted illustrations of the sherabi appear to take the text literally. In a folio from the British Library Baburnama, the sherabi is visualized not as a crocodile but as a swimming tiger, caught in the act of devouring a water buffalo.32 Another folio, in the collection of the Walters Museum (W. 596.29B), depicts the sherabi as a composite creature with the face of a tiger and the body of a dragon.33 Such sources suggest that decolonizing the wilderness requires allowing it to become a dangerous and strange space again, in which the relationship between human and non-human animals was subject to constant negotiation. This requires the disentangling of institutional and epistemological structures introduced through the British. In order to solidify control over untamed yet potentially profitable landscapes, the British recast non-human animals as “vermin” and reframed the “jungle” as a space that needed to be made safe for human presence. “Man-eating” predators – such as tigers, leopards, cheetah, wolves, and even snakes – were eradicated systematically, as were sometimes also crocodiles and other river-dwelling creatures, which posed a threat to the activities of game hunters.34 The hardening boundaries between wildernesses and human settlements were at odds with the practices of both precolonial 424

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communities and contemporary Indian princely states, for whom hunting was limited to population surpluses, and who understood the wilderness as not always within the realm of human control.35 The notion that humans can, and should, control nature continues through the postcolonial state, in which policies of wildlife conservation stand in contradiction to efforts to redirect rivers and expand irrigation. It is perhaps telling that the biggest threat to tigers and crocodiles today comes from the first phase of the central government’s proposed river linking project, which is projected to cause irreparable damage to two key sites along the Ken River in Madhya Pradesh: the Panna tiger reserve and the Ken ghariyal sanctuary.36

Following the Flight of the Great Indian Bustard Another potential casualty of unmitigated development is the iconic great Indian bustard (ardeotis nigriceps), which may form a postcolonial parallel to the demise of the dodo. A majestic creature, the Indian bustard is the largest and heaviest bird native to the Indian subcontinent. Males of the species can grow to about 1 meter tall, their wingspan can extend up to 2 1/2 meters, and they can weigh between 15 and 18 kilograms. Once plentiful in the Indian landscape, the bustard today is on the brink of extinction. In the early 1960s, the renowned ornithologist Salim Ali nominated it for adoption as India’s national bird, specifically to incite “an urgent nation-wide effort” to save the bustard from “its impending doom” due to poaching and encroachment.37 At that time, the number of bustards was estimated at around 1,260. Today, the situation is far more dire, with the estimated total vacillating between just 150 and 250 birds.38 While the bustard was passed over for the peacock, Ali’s work inspired others, and extensive reserves were established for the conservation of bustards, particularly in the state of Madhya Pradesh. Among the most successful was the Bustard Sanctuary at Karera, established in 1981 to protect the birds’ nests along the sandy banks along the Mahuar River. However, agrarian expansion and the increasing density of commercial livestock have undone the initial success of the reserve in the decades following its foundation, and bustards have completely disappeared from that land.39 Other sanctuaries have suffered a similar fate, leading to concerted efforts of denotification at both Karera and a second sanctuary at Ghatigaon on the grounds that the ongoing restrictions on development have deprived nearby villagers of basic facilities and roads.40 In short, the arguments in favor of the denotification of protected land not only takes for granted the nature-human divide but rhetorically pits the needs of wildlife against rural, marginalized communities. The denotification of not one but two bustard sanctuaries in the state bodes poorly for the revival, if not the survival, of the species given that the protected areas around Madhya Pradesh’s rivers served as the great Indian bustard’s most promising, and expansive, grounds for breeding and repopulation. The bustard’s disappearance from the central Indian landscape is particularly tragic given its historical rootedness, as seen through visual and textual sources. It was admired by the emperor Babur, who compared it with interest to its counterpart, the Otis tarda, in central Asia, and complimented its culinary qualities, noting that “all of [its] meat is delicious and good.”41 In an illustrated folio in the British library Baburnama, the bustard is depicted with great care, roaming along the edge of a river in a hilly landscape, filled with scrub and tall grass (see Figure 32.3). The artist Mansur has perfectly captured the bird’s key features: its black cap set strikingly against a pale head and long neck, its thin and tall legs, its brown body, and the black-edged wings.42 Babur’s emphasis on the bustard’s 425

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Figure 32.3  Mansur, ‘Indian bustard,’ Detail of a folio from The Memoirs of Babur, 1590–1593. London, British Library, Or. 3714 Vol.4 f.389.  (c) The British Library Board. By permission of the British Library.

edibility is likely linked to one of his primary concerns: securing adequate provisions for his army while traveling.43 We know from the Jahangirnama that the Mughals also hunted bustards occasionally for sport, although they do not appear to have done so in great volumes. For example, in recording a hunting expedition in early March 1611, the Mughal emperor Jahangir noted that he had bagged a total of 1,414 kills, only one of which was a bustard.44 The bustard’s decline appears to have begun in earnest under the British, a by-product of increased hunting and agrarian development. For sportsmen, bustards posed a prize challenge. They could only be bagged with a shotgun at short range, and their preference for open hilly terrain and acute sense of smell gave the hunter little cover. Bustards were also remarkably quick to raise alarm and could fly a significant distance when distressed. By the early twentieth century, their numbers had thinned significantly, and conservationists began expressing concern about the possibility of extinction.45 The situation has only worsened since independence. Although poaching has continued to pose a threat, the biggest problem remains environmental encroachment through the expansion of fields, the proliferation of irrigation canals, the heavy employment of pesticides, the use of protected land for livestock grazing, and the mining of riverbeds for sand. Somewhat paradoxically, new green initiatives have also posed a danger, as power lines, solar farms, and windmills can be hazardous for birds with low-flight paths and poor frontal vision, although it is worth noting that new initiatives have recently been taken to encourage power companies to place high voltage lines underground in the areas around conservation reserves.46

Reclaiming the Yamuna River In many ways, the struggles surrounding the reservation of land for endangered species can be linked to questions of visibility and access, and to the ways in which recent patterns of 426

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urbanism have hardened the perceived and real boundaries between humans and nature. In Delhi, for example, the prioritization of contemporary global capital over the ecological limitations of the original flood-plain has had the effect of disconnecting the city from the Yamuna River, which paradoxically was its life-blood and raison d’être in precolonial periods. Unlike the earlier sultans or the Mughals, whose imperial fortresses have been subsumed within the structure of the postcolonial city, present-day contractors have shown little interest in connecting new buildings to the river. Although the Yamuna remains one of India’s most sacred rivers, its deeply polluted waters attract few visitors in Delhi, and the shape of urbanization has rendered it largely invisible from within. In many parts of Delhi, to see the river, one must make a concerted effort to physically approach it.47 Some of the most concerted efforts to counter such processes and reintegrate nature into the fabric of the city have come from contemporary artists. Among the best known is Atul Bhalla, who has pioneered new forms of ecocritical engagement. In January 2007, during a residency at Khoj, he launched a photographic performance, during which he spent four days walking the entire length of the Yamuna River through Delhi. He started in the north, at the scenic village of Palla, where the river enters the ambit of the city, and ended at the far south, at the Okhla Barrage. Originally developed in 1874 by the British as the starting point of the Agra Canal, the Okhla Barrage today also serves as the site of a small but significant bird sanctuary, reserving an area along the river in support of over 300 different avian species. In 2012, he published a book simply titled Yamuna Walk, which acts as both a documentation and extension of his bodily performance, revealing the diverse ways in which the river still sustains life in India’s capital city for a broader audience.48 As in many of Bhalla’s photographic performances and installations, the project encourages larger publics to engage closely with the river, to follow Bhalla on his journey in ways to engage in a variety of senses. The first page asks the reader directly, “When did you last see the Yamuna? When did you last touch the Yamuna?” From there, the book follows his path, interspersing photographs with pages of text that mark the transition from one day to the next. These summarize each stage of his journey with a poetic terseness, using repetition that evoke the rhythmic sensation of walking, and using short phrases that enhance the viewer’s emotive experience. The sequencing of photographs highlights the many paradoxes of the river, juxtaposing stretches of seemingly pristine nature with the ravages of industrial pollution and urban expansion. He begins by capturing an expanse of riverbank that would appear almost inviting if not for the thickness of the polluted water and scattering of trash. The slim horizon, extending across the top of the image, reveals a sparse line of trees interspersed with power-lines. The only hint of life is the shadowy presence of two small figures, of a man and a wild dog, at the composition’s edges.49 In the photographs that follow, Bhalla takes the viewer through a sequence of contrasting images, moving from kids playing to people gathering and preparing food around temporary shelters, and dhobis washing clothes at the river’s edge. We see men dressed in well-fitted slacks and urban jackets, devout householders and priests wheeling clay icons for ritual immersion, and indigent day laborers gathering trash from the river. We encounter birds flying freely through a seeming untouched natural landscape followed by a stretch of water littered heavily with plastic bags. We pass blossoming fields of marigolds, water buffalo enjoying the sandy river bank, and irrigation channels weaving towards vibrant fields. But we also encounter views of trucks digging up sand, industrial pipes overflowing with toxic foam, and the skeletal metal remains of stripped and abandoned vehicles. One image captures a remarkably still stretch of the river, whose mirrored surfaces reveal the 427

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reflection of a towering smoke stack. Another photograph displays the painful waste of water as it flows freely and unattended from a large storage tank. The last stretch of images move the viewer towards Okhla, showing virtually no gap between human life and the nature reserve. We see villagers gathering at edge of the shallow and polluted waters near the Agra canal, a sight that calls to mind David Haberman’s observation of the area, made just a few years earlier, of “a tiny stream of black sudsy water” oozing through the empty riverbed “strewn with trash.”50 Fittingly, the final photograph in Bhalla’s journey is of the Okhla Bird Sanctuary itself, which he depicts, in contrast to his earlier expansive landscapes, as an obstructed view of a marshy wetlands shot through a seemingly impenetrable chain link fence. The sanctuary appears close but unattainable, comparatively lush and pristine but also empty of human presence. The text for that day – January 28, 2007 – evokes the stark divide between human settlement and wildlife habitat in staccato lines: bird sanctuary you are not allowed inside (?) In this final paradox, Bhalla perhaps inadvertently gestures towards the impossibility of true decolonization in the face of unremitting urbanization and impending extinction. In his performance, humans and endangered species are pushed literally to the edges of development, forced to compete for increasingly scares spaces of habitability. At the same time, Bhalla’s engagement offers a degree of optimism and hope. The act of walking along the Yamuna and documenting the experience can be seen as an act of reclaiming, an effort to render visible the many ways in which the river remains vital. The battles are ongoing, but they are not yet fully lost. Perhaps inadvertently, Bhalla’s performance also highlights the fundamental interconnection between human and non-human life, both of which remain dependent on the same flowing river. In the process of revealing life along the river, his photographs also reinforce the ways in which the legacies of colonialism inherited by the postcolonial nation continue to marginalize both human and non-human communities, reinforcing the colonial separation rather than the precolonial entanglement of humans with nature.

Notes 1 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 3, 1–40. 2 Ibid., 17, 29–30. 3 S. K. Tiwari, Wildlife Sanctuaries of Madhya Pradesh: State of Bio Diversity and Human Infringement (New Delhi: APH Pub. Corp., 1997). 4 Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857–2010, 4th ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020), 301–316. 5 Ramaswamy R. Iyer (1929–2015), “River Linking Project: A Disquieting Judgment,” Economic & Political Weekly 47, no. 14 (April 7, 2012): 33–40; Mahesh Chandra Chaturvedi, India’s Waters (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2012), 319–332; Nidhi Pasi and Richard Smardon, “Policy Analysis: Inter-Linking of Rivers: A Solution for Water Crisis in India or a Decision in Doubt?,” Journal of Science Policy and Governance 2, no. 2 (June 2012): 1–42.

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Human-Animal Relations in the Indian Landscape 6 Julia Shaw, “Religion, ‘Nature’ and Environmental Ethics in Ancient India: Archaeologies of Human: Non-human Suffering and Well-Being in Early Buddhist and Hindu Contexts,” World Archaeology 48, no. 4 (August 7, 2016): 517–543. See also Sugata Ray, Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019), especially 97–102; Radhika Govindrajan, Radhika, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Reiko Ohnuma, Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Thomas R. Trautmann, Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 7 T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 8 For a brief overview of historical ecology, see Erin Beller, Loren McClenachan, Andrew Trant, Eric W. Sanderson, Jeanine Rhemtulla, Anita Guerrini, Robin Grossinger, and Eric Higgs, “Toward Principles of Historical Ecology,” American Journal of Botany 104, no. 5 (2017): 645–648. 9 Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 10 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago, IL and London: University Of Chicago Press, 2016), 11 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222. See also Sugata Ray, “‘Dead as a Dodo’: Anthropocene Extinction in the Early Modern World.” TDR 67, no. 1 (March 2023): 126–35. 12 Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1660–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Gregory Allen Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); William Beinart, and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 13 John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press, 1998); Beinart and Hughes, Environment and Empire, 214–232. 14 On the origin of the concept of the Plantationocene, see Donna Haraway, Noboru Ishikawa, Scott F. Gilbert, Kenneth Olwig, Anna L. Tsing, and Nil Bubandt. “Anthropologists Are T ­ alking— About the Anthropocene,” Ethnos 81, no. 3 (2016): 535–564. On the need to incorporate race into conversations in the environmental humanities, see J. Davis, A. A. Moulton, L. Van Sant, and B. Williams. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene? A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises,” Geography Compass 13, no. 5 (2019): e12438–15. For a more recent assessment, see Wendy Wolford, “The Plantationocene: A Lusotropical Contribution to the Theory,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111, no. 6 (September 19, 2021): 1622–1639. 15 Michael H. Fisher, An Environmental History of India: From Earliest Times to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 141–145. 16 Deborah Hutton, “Raja Deen Dayal and Sons: Photographing Hyderabad’s Famine Relief Efforts,” History of Photography 31, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 260–275. 17 Madhav Gadgil, and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 181–214. 18 Charlotte E. Blattner, Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders: Extraterritorial Jurisdiction and the Challenges of Globalization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 328–330. 19 Paul Salopek, “Inside the Deadly World of India’s Sand Mining Mafia,” National Geographic (June 26, 2019), accessed August 11, 2022; Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018). 20 Amita Baviskar, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); Nikhil Anand, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 21 Romila Thapar, “Perceiving the Forest in Early India,” in India’s Environmental History: A Reader, ed. Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan, 2 vols (Ranikhet & Bangalore: Permanent Black, 2012), 2:105–126.

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Tamara Sears 22 H.A.R. Gibb, and Charles Beckingham, trans. The Travels of Ibn Battuta (A.D. 1325–1354). 4 vols. (Cambridge and London: The Hakluyt Society, 1994), 4: 776–781. See also, Tamara Sears, “Ibn Battuta’s Buddhists: Monuments, Memory, and the Materiality of Travel,” in Encountering Buddhism and Islam in Premodern Central and South Asia, ed. Blain Auer and Ingo Strauch, 97–127 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), 114. 23 Gibb and Beckingham, Travels, 788–790. 24 The scene occurs in Act 3 of Bhavabhuti’s Malatimadhava. See M. R. Kale, Bhavabhuti’s Malatimadhava with Commentary of Jagaddhara (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1967), 33–35. 25 Susan Stronge, Painting for the Mughal Emperor: The Art of the Book 1560–1660 (London: V&A Publications, 2002) 62 and plate 41; Divyabhanusinh, “Hunting in Mughal Painting,” in Flora and Fauna in Mughal Art, ed. Som Prakash Verma (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 1999), 94–98. For a digitized image, see the Victoria and Albert Museum website: https://collections. vam.ac.uk/item/O9304/akbar-painting-basawan/, accessed October 15, 2022. 26 Tiwari, Wildlife Sanctuaries, 20–21. 27 Up-today data regarding endangered species is searchable through the IUCN Red List website at iucncsg.org, accessed October 15, 2022. 28 Catherine Benton, God of Desire: Tales of Kamadeva in Sanskrit Story Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 149–152. 29 Wheeler Thackston, trans. The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor (Washington, DC: Freer and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 342. 30 Som Prakash Verma, The Illustrated Baburnama (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 383, Figure11; Plate CXLIII. For a digital image, see https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/folio-of-baburnama-unknown/wgEj2j20l23Dpg?hl=en, accessed Oct 15, 2022. The British Library Baburnama possesses an analogous representation depicting Babur crossing the Yamuna River (BL Shelfmark Or. 3714 Vol.4 f.504v). See also Hamid Suleiman, Miniatures of Babur-Nama (Tashkent: Fan Publishing House of the Uzbek SSR, 1970), plate 94. For the corresponding text, see Thackston, Baburnama, 432. 31 Thackston, Baburnama, 342. 32 Suleiman, Miniatures, plate 71; BL Shelfmark Or. 3714 Vol.4 f.393v. 33 For a digital image, see https://art.thewalters.org/detail/5476/birds-of-hindustan-and-alligators-2/, accessed Oct 15, 2022. 34 Mahesh Rangarajan, “The Raj and the Natural World: The Campaign against ‘Dangerous Beasts’ in Colonial India, 1875–1925,” in India’s Environmental History: A Reader, ed. Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan, 2 vols. (Ranikhet & Bangalore: Permanent Black, 2012), 2: 95–142; Mahesh Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces, 1860–1914 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); Vijaya Ramadas Mandala, Shooting a Tiger: Big-Game Hunting and Conservation in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019); David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), esp. 80–83. 35 Julie E. Hughes, “Royal Tigers and Ruling Princes: Wilderness and Wildlife Management in the Indian Princely States,” Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 4 (2015): 1210–1260. 36 See, for example, Debarshi Dasgupta, “India Clears its First River-Linking Project, Prompting Ecological Concerns,” India Straits Times (January 2, 2022, 9:59pm), https://www.straitstimes. com/asia/south-asia/india-clears-its-first-river-linking-project-prompting-ecological-concerns, accessed September 15, 2022 37 Salim Ali, “Our National Bird,” Newsletter for Birdwatchers 1, no. 4 (1961): 3–4. 38 Shaheer Khan, Nilanjan Chatterjee, and Bilal Habib. “Testing Performance of Large-Scale Surveys in Determining Trends for the Critically Endangered Great Indian Bustard Ardeotis Nigriceps,” Scientific Reports 9, no. 1 (August 12, 2019): 11627. 39 Asad R. Rahmani, “The Conservation of the Great Indian Bustard Ardeotis Nigriceps (Vigors) in the Karera Bustard Sanctuary,” Biological Conservation 46, no. 2 (January 1, 1988): 139, 140–141. 40 Rahul Noronha, “Why a Wildlife Park Meant to Protect the Great Indian Bustard Got Denotified in MP,” India Today, August 4, 2022, https://www.indiatoday.in/india-­today-insight/story/why-a-­wildlifepark-meant-to-protect-the-great-indian-bustard-got-denotified-in-mp-1983741-2022-08-04, ­accessed 10/27/2022; Satyaprakash Sharma, “Madhya Pradesh to Denotify 86 sq km of Wildlife Sanctuary,” The Statesman, November 16, 2018, https://www.thestatesman.com/cities/­madhyapradesh-denotify-86-sq-km-wildlife-sanctuary-1502586894.html, accessed 10/27/2022. The

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Human-Animal Relations in the Indian Landscape official report on Ghatigaon denotification from 2019 can be found on the official website of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and CLimage Change for the Government of India: http://forestsclearance.nic.in/admin/report_Wildlife_Warden_Part-II.aspx?Cat_Id=FP/MP/Others/3900/2019 41 Thackston, Baburnama, 340. 42 Asok Kumar Das, Wonders of Nature: Ustad Mansur at the Mughal Court (Mumbai: Marg, 2012), 36, Figures 2.14 and 2.15. 43 Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and Highroads to Empire 1500–1700 (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 104. 44 Wheeler M. Thackston, trans., The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India (Washington, DC: Freer and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 120, 317. 45 Mandala, Shooting a Tiger, 183, 198. E. C. Stuart Baker, Indian Game Birds, vol 2: Snipe, Bustards, Sand Grouse (London: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, Ltd., 1921), 175, 177–185; Walter Elliot, “Notes on the Indian Bustard (Eupodotis edwardsi), with especial reference to its Gular Pouch,” in Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (London: Messrs. Longmann, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1880), 486–489. 46 Prerna Bindra, “The Bustard and the Windmill,” The Hindu, September 2, 2017, https://www. thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/the-bustard-and-the-windmill/article19608564. ece, accessed October 17, 2022; PTI. “Habitats of Critically Endangered Great Indian Bustard to Be Declared Conservation Reserves.” PTI, “Habitats of Critically Endangered Great Indian Bustard to Be Declared Conservation Reserves,” ThePrint, November 21, 2019, https://theprint.in/ environment/habitats-of-critically-endangered-great-indian-bustard-to-be-declared-conservationreserves/324399/, accessed October 17, 2022. 47 See, for example, Venugopal Maddipati, “Water in the Expanded Field: Art, Thought and Immersion in the Yamuna River: 2005 – 2011,” in Rethinking Place in South Asian and Islamic Art, 1500-­Present, ed. Rebecca Brown and Deborah Hutton, 60–77 (New York: Routledge, 2016), 67–68. 48 Atul Bhalla, Yamuna Walk (Seattle and London: Sepia Eye, New York in Conjunction with the University of Washignton Press, 2012). 49 Select photographs from the project can be found here: http://www.yamuna-elbe.de/index. php?title=Yamuna_River_Walk_en, accessed November 13, 2022. 50 David Haberman, River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 77.

Selected Bibliography Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago, IL and ­London: University Of Chicago Press, 2016. Govindrajan, Radhika. Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Haberman, David. River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Ohnuma, Reiko. Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination. New York: ­Oxford University Press, 2017. Rangarajan, Mahesh. Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces, 1860–1914. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. Rangarajan, Mahesh, and K Sivaramakrishnan. India’s Environmental History. 2 vols. Ranikhet and Bangalore: Permanent Black, 2012. Ray, Sugata. “‘Dead as a Dodo’: Anthropocene Extinction in the Early Modern World.” TDR 67, no. 1 (March 2023): 126–35. Ray, Sugata. Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, ­1550–1850. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. Trautmann, Thomas R. Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

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33 “WE ARE SO MANY BODIES, MY FRIENDS” Countervisibility as Resurgent Tactics Sarita Echavez See

Her back confronts us. She turns away from us and toward the wall just inches in front of her nose. Lit from behind, she casts a shadow on the wall in front of her and she gives all her attention to her shadow, tracing and caressing its outline. Her entire body moves in concert with her shadow (Figure 33.1). Why won’t she show us her face? I open this chapter with the Filipinx-American artist Gina Osterloh’s performance “Press and Outline” because it asks us a simple but powerful question about the implications of the artist’s decision to avert her face, bound up as the face is with a racial regime of recognition and representation and with a colonial technology of surveillance.1 This aversion is, I argue, part of a Filipinx-American artistic practice of countervisibility with important repercussions for how we understand the relation between the artist and colonized history. By colonized history, I mean both the colonial structure of the discipline of (art) history and the history of Western/American conquest and colonialism. With my focus on the history of the American conquest and colonization of the Philippines, I specifically refer to the rise of American counterinsurgency as a means of attempting to defeat anticolonial insurgent, guerilla warfare during the Philippine-American War, 1899–1913. During the American conquest of the Philippines, counterinsurgency emerged as a military technology and ideology with implications for colonial warfare and anticolonial resistance across the twentiethand twenty-first centuries in Southeast Asia and beyond. Military studies scholars, generals, and field manuals have spilled so much ink—with whose spilled blood?—on the theory of counterinsurgency, which in practice has proven over and over again to be a spectacular imperial failure with cataclysmically asymmetrical and utterly incalculable costs. I instead try to offer an Other theory of resurgence. Contemporary Filipinx-American artists like Osterloh, I suggest, are tracing the outline of that shadow history of insurgent warfare, a resurgent practice of countervisibility in and through contemporary culture and art.

The Politics of In/visiblility As a number of scholars have shown, the visual display of Filipinxs in the United States temporally and ideologically coincided with the American military conquest of the P ­ hilippines at the end of the nineteenth century, a brutal and brutally forgotten war that scholars DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-38 432

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Figure 33.1  Gina Osterloh, Press and Outline, black and white 16 mm film loop, no audio, 2014. Courtesy of the artist.

have described as genocidal according to even the most conservative definitions of genocide. Only fairly recently in American studies scholarship has the Philippine-American War (1899–1913) been recognized as a genocidal race war, as opposed to a Philippine rebellion or insurrection or the American “acquisition” of yet another island, starting with literary critic Oscar Campomanes’s essays in the 1990s, Angel Shaw and Luis Francia’s 2002 edited volume Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899–1999, and Dylan Rodríguez’s 2009 monograph Suspended Apocalypse. (American studies scholars tend to cite Amy Kaplan’s 2002 monograph The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture when it comes to the Philippine-American War but I think it vital to acknowledge Campomanes’s publications, which preceded Kaplan by about a decade.) These and other publications were major innovations in the study of the US empire and the global nature of white supremacy that emanated out of the field of Filipinx/ American studies. Concomitantly, a range of critics and historians have come at the question of the historical and discursive absence and invisibility of the Filipinx in the United States. Campomanes argued that the forgetting of the Filipinx is an active project of “invisibilization” in the United States that is tied to America’s national amnesia about its own settler and military (and not just economic and cultural) colonial foundations.2 Importantly shifting the emphasis from the minoritized to the postcolonial, Campomanes linked the question of the “unrepresentability” of the Filipinx to “unassimilability.” At the same time it has been 433

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crucial to underscore just how insidious and capacious the hegemonic power of invisibility is for the imperial subject or the “subject of transparency” in Denise da Silva’s phrase. This hegemonic power of invisibility is at least twofold in nature. The imperial subject wields the power of rendering the Other invisible, e.g. peripheral, inferior and unworthy of recognition, and the imperial subject wields the power to itself remain invisible and transparent, what Jodi Kim has called America’s “vanishing act.” This unmarkedness allows the (­particular) imperial subject—or what David Lloyd has called the “Subject without ­properties” – to set the terms of (universal) subjectivity.3 Nerissa Balce refined Campomanes’s thesis by arguing that the visibility of the Filipinx body, especially within the photographic frame, requires the invisibilization of the conditions surrounding that visibility.4 The hypervisible representation of the Filipinx in American popular cultural forms in the early decades of the twentieth century—from the newspaper cartoon to the photograph to the World’s Fair exhibition—ironically enabled the erasure of the extraordinarily violent historical circumstances surrounding the emergence of the Filipinx’s visibility. In other words, representation accompanies, requires, and advances the obliteration of history. Allow me to pause here in order to apprehend the full irony of the nullifying destructiveness associated with the achievement of visibility and representation in the Philippine case, what I have referred to elsewhere as the phenomenon of “knowledge nullius.”5 From the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century vantage, in critical race and ethnic studies scholarship in the neoliberal American university invisibility usually is associated with powerlessness, marginalization and lack, e.g. lack of representation. However, as Balce’s work on early twentieth-century visual culture shows, the Philippine-American War demands that we understand the hypervisibility of the Filipinx not as a positive achievement but as the outcome of a genocidal colonial race war. For example, in her 2006 essay “The Filipina Breast: Savagery, Docility, and the Erotics of the American Empire,” Balce showed us how, in the early decades of the twentieth century, the image of the naked Filipina woman or girl—reduced to the spectacle of bared breasts—created an eroticized docility that, in the American imperial visual economy, functioned as invidious contrast with the untamable violence of the Filipinx warrior. Balce argued that, in colonial illustrated travel books, photographs of bare-breasted native women were “indexical and iconic signs of the U.S. Empire,” used to “imaginatively reconstruct the violence of American rule in the Philippines” and instead propagate the vision of “docile bodies under imperial control.”6 Similarly, in the context of colonial and postcolonial Jamaica and the Bahamas, the art historian Krista Thompson documents how deliberately both British imperial and local elite regimes worked to create images of a more tamed, orderly, and alluring landscape and people, all in the name of civilizational, developmentalist projects like building the tourism industry. These projects effected what Thompson calls “tropicalization” in the realm of photography, which had real and often devastating consequences; that is to say, the material and representational alteration of the inhabitants and the islands, with especially detrimental consequences for Black communities ranging from socioeconomic neglect to stratification and segregation.7 Interventions like those of Balce and Thompson have been excellent reminders about the potentially destructive effects of visibility for the racial colonized subject. To put it bluntly, the racial colonized subject’s achievement of visibility and presence is not necessarily a good thing, especially in the era of colonial war—from hilltop forts to drones—wherein visibility means targetability. In the case of the Philippines, Alfred McCoy has shown how crucial the role of American colonial surveillance, policing, and crime has been in the making of the modern Philippine state—the repression of radical nationalism and its replacement 434

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with conservative patronage politics—as well as in the flow of surveillance information and technology from the Philippine post/colony to the United States. Given this long history of Spanish, American, and then post/neo/colonial surveillance in the Philippines wherein visibility has meant discipline and punishment, it should come as no surprise that Filipinx invisibility has turned into a source of power rather than disempowerment. One of the important goals and effects of decolonizing art history might be to allow us to discern this pattern of transvaluation—that is to say, how Filipinxs take back, appropriate, and revalue invisibilization as a source of power. Moreover, this relationship between spectacle and history or, rather, between visual representation and historical erasure continues to redound upon a wide range of FilipinxAmerican visual cultural forms in the twenty-first century. For example, with its special attention to the technology of photography, Balce’s analysis of the politics of in/visibility has opened up ways to make connections between contemporary Filipinx-American visual and expressive culture and its sociohistorical origins in the American conquest and colonization of the Philippines. Returning to Osterloh’s “Press and Outline,” how might Balce’s study of the frontal portrait of bare-breasted women demand that we make a transhistorical connection to Osterloh’s back?

Front to Back: Toward a Tactics of Countervisibility Indebted to and in conversation with many other scholars in Filipinx-American and diasporic studies on the problematics of representation, I want to suggest that, in making a connection between Balce’s “front” and Osterloh’s “back,” we consider making a shift from a politics of in/visibility to a tactics of countervisibility. While I want to acknowledge the rich theorization of countervisibility in Black studies, particularly Black visual cultural studies, I’d like to suggest that the case of the Philippines and the US-Filipinx diaspora might demand a differential approach to the importance of moving toward a tactics of countervisibility and away from a politics of in/visibility.8 While invisibility might be bound up with the pressure to accede to the demand for assimilationist inclusion and representation, I turn to countervisibility because I want to resurrect—perhaps in problematically transhistorical ways—a connection between contemporary art and cultural production to the legacy of early twentieth-century guerilla warfare and the violence of counterinsurgency. Let me illustrate what I am proposing by turning to another contemporary Filipinx-American artist who deploys countervisibility tactics. In her video installation Body Double, Stephanie Syjuco uses black screen to crop out everything but the tropical landscape of Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War like Apocalypse Now and Platoon that were filmed in the Philippines.9 As curator Siddharta Perez has put it, the Philippines has served as both “proxy” for the fictive representation of America at war in Vietnam and “proto-site” for the actual supply of American weapons and personnel in Asia.10 While there is a lot that one could say about Syjuco’s Body Double, for the purposes of this chapter I focus on what she does with the peripheral and the marginal on screen and what this editing technique implies for theorizing the minoritized identitarian. Syjuco does not fill the screen with Filipinx faces and bodies. Her imaginings, her home movies, so to speak, take the form of countervisibility and not straightforward visibility. So when it comes to the implications of her work for the representation of the minoritized identitarian, Syjuco ignites our interest in playing with camouflage, the ability to blend in with one’s surroundings and, if necessary, to hide in plain sight (Figure 33.2). 435

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Figure 33.2  Stills from Stephanie Syjuco’s video installation Body Double. Courtesy of the artist.

Osterloh also plays with the theme of camouflage and the “mimicry of color and pattern.”11 She is known for anti-portrait strategies that “thwart identification,” as she puts it, or what David Lloyd has called “non-subjectifying” portraits.12 As part of what spurs her interest in camouflage and countervisibility, the artist explicitly references her experience growing up biracial—Filipina and white—in Ohio constantly confronted with the interrogatives “where are you from?” and “what are you?”13 Notably, in response to the question “If you were asked to describe your work in just a few words, what would you say?” Osterloh replied: “pressing against.”14 In the performance film loop Press and Outline (2014), Osterloh stands alone facing a blank wall just an inch or two away from her nose.15 Her back to the audience, she is barefoot and clad in a black full-body leotard, her hair tied up in a simple bun. She is lit from behind and she casts a full-body shadow onto the wall. The shadow becomes her partner as she silently traces the outline of her shadow. Caressing, pressing, and moving her body up and down the wall, Osterloh performs a slow dance with her ever-conjoined shadow. She seems to follow the movement of the shadow rather than the other way around. One critic remarks that it seems as if it is “her shadow that takes the lead and influences Osterloh’s kinesthetics.” In this way, Osterloh explores “how action defines and activates the simultaneously conjoined and distinct space between a body and its surroundings, between self and other,” as another critic has put it.16 Osterloh’s slow dance with her shadow seems so private, something that we should not interrupt. She is turned away from us to be with someone else. On the one hand, we the viewers feel excluded and voyeuristic. On the other hand, we have been invited to watch a public display of this body. It is an eerie event because of this combination of enclosed intimacy and exposed vulnerability. In the black-and-white film loop (versus live 436

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performance) version, the silence of Ostleroh’s strange dance is interrupted by the whirring sound of the vintage film projector that Osterloh has installed to play the loop. That whirring sound transforms Osterloh’s dance from the scene of contemporary art to the scene of ethnographic documentation and the history of the accumulation of the image of the primitive Filipinx. Our perception of her body becomes blurred between two visual histories, between the history of conceptual art and the history of imperial ethnography. We simultaneously are disinvited and invited to gaze at the body of the Filipina. Osterloh is not naked and yet she seems so. We cannot decide whether it is erotically charged or not, and I think it is both. It is that conjoinment of at least two visual histories that brings us back to Nerissa Balce’s essay “The Filipina Breast” and Balce’s account of the fundamentally gendered nature of the production of a domesticated and docile colonial subject. Osterloh turns her back to the camera, her face and chest facing the wall, and in doing so asks us to turn our eyes away. We move away from the identificatory and toward the history of sexualized, racialized visibility that Balce documents and analyzes. In other words, Osterloh invokes this history through the production of the countervisible body. Following in the footsteps of Native studies scholars, we might consider the work of contemporary artists as the practice of what the literary critic Christopher Pexa (Spirit Lake) calls a “kind of long pause, a drawing in of breath.” In his study of the assimilationist era of Dakhóta writings and oral histories following the 1862 US-Dakhóta War, which generally are understood as a “period of vacantness,” Pexa argues that we instead must pay attention to what is “in the guise of complicity”—what is “understated and covert” rather than “active and explicit”—in order to hear and understand the messages that assimilationist era Dakhóta intellectuals, under tremendous pressure, were sending to the future of their people.17 Pexa rereads and reactivates this period of “vacantness,” thus making it possible to link twenty-first-century water protector activists and the #NoDAPL movement that emerged in 2016 to US settler colonial violence against the Dakhóta people in the nineteenth century. Through Pexa’s concept of the “pause,” we might connect Osterloh’s commitment to anti-portraiture and the thwarting of identification to the history of guerilla strategies and covert fighting during the Philippine-American War over a century ago. A monumentally violent war, the Philippine-American War still is referred to in some standard tertiary and secondary sources as an “insurrection” and “rebellion.” What the Americans contemptuously called “amigo warfare” was developed by Filipinx fighters, a tactical mode of resistance that would shape the Americans’ development of principles of counterinsurgency in the rest of Southeast Asia and around the globe across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. The Philippine-American War was the Americans’ first major combat operation of the twentieth century, and it is an important historical case study and footnote about counterinsurgency in American army manuals.18 The war shifted from more traditional modes of armed conflict, e.g. armies on battlefields, to guerilla tactics of constant, small-scale ambushes that relied on fighters’ ability to be indeterminate from—and, thus, supported by—the local population. How might this history of guerilla warfare come alive again, albeit obliquely, in Osterloh’s work on camouflage, which is less about blending in than blurring outlines and not standing forth?19 Though it received a great amount of attention in the American and Filipinx press and had a major impact on American popular culture at the time, the Philippine-American War subsequently has been forgotten on a monumental scale.20 If it is a footnote in military 437

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history, it barely is mentioned in standard American, Filipinx, and Southeast Asian history textbooks despite the scale of the war’s devastation in the Philippines and the repercussions of American conquest, e.g. the establishment of the US Navy in Asia and the rise of transoceanic American imperialism. The legacy of the Philippine-American War is what Dylan Rodríguez calls a “suspended apocalypse,” an epochal form of amnesia amongst Americans, Filipinxs, and Southeast Asians. So the question that I recurrently return to in my work on contemporary Filipinx-American culture is, given the massive failure of history as a source of memory and the assault on memory itself, are there tactics alternative to remembering? Tactics that enable the decoding of silence, deletion, and distortion? The contemporary Filipinx-American poet Eric Gamalinda describes, I think, such tactics in the poem “DMZ” in his collection Amigo Warfare. At the beginning of the poem, the narrator is burdened and exhausted, with a body whose “weight I am sick of carrying” and with “pockets filled with intricate maps / and useless strategies.” Over the course of the poem, the narrator seems to be preparing for the “end of my life,” begging for forgiveness of both psychic and material debts and getting ready to succumb to either a form of selfimmolation or drowning. But by the end of the poem, the narrator re-emerges through a renewed sense of agential history and collective purpose: … Summoned to testify on everyone’s behalf. I’m sticking to my story. It’s better not to talk about the wounded, or the moist remains of the disappeared. But there’s always one who can tell, in the packed amplitude of crowds. We are so many bodies, my friends. We all move in the same direction. As though someone had a plan.21 In these concluding lines to the poem, Gamalinda writes about traditions of communal, concerted, and leaderless maneuver. The line “as though someone had a plan” underscores how the force of collective movement lies in its leaderlessness, undercutting what Cedric Robinson has called the “terms of order” established by the “myth of leadership.” “Someone”—the cult of the leader—does not exist. What does exist is the many-bodied insurgent action of moving “in the same direction.” Several words and phrases yield multiple meanings—a rich kind of ambivalence—about who is doing what at any moment. For example, the verb “tell”—“there’s always one / who can tell”—can mean several things. It can refer to the act of narrating and telling a story. It also can refer to acts of recognition, reportage, and betrayal. One must be able to discern, for example, who is an insurgent fighter in the “packed / amplitude of crowds” so that one then can betray and rat on or tell on the fighter. But the movement of the poem ultimately deploys the verb “tell” as a form of testimony—the narrator is “summoned to testify / on everyone’s behalf”—which has a transformational effect on the idea of “everyone.” The role of the poet-narrator here is to transform or convert the “crowds” into “many bodies” who become “friends” of the poet. It is through the poet, and not at the behest of a leader, that the “crowds” become a collectivized “we” who “all move in the same direction.” Through the poet’s voice we can see what H. Francisco Penones calls, in his review of 438

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Gamalinda’s Amigo Warfare, “our salvation and common route.” In another review, Patrick Rosal argues that the power of Gamalinda’s poetic vision—his “model of seeing”—lies in its merging of “astonishment” with the accustomed.22 Indeed, Gamalinda’s poems “take their own astonishment for granted,” and the “extraordinary really is a daily fact.” This embedding of the extraordinary in the ordinary defines insurgent or amigo warfare and the ability to wield camouflage so as not to stand out as an identifiable enemy but rather to appear ordinary. There also is an important deconstruction of both “someone” and the “plan.” Generally speaking, the conjunction “as though” produces a subjunctive mood, indicating the unreality of the speaker’s relation to the utterance. In Gamalinda’s poem, the conjunction “as though” works to undercut our psychological and ideological attachment to the concept of a leader and to undermine the concept of temporal and spatial control embedded in the idea of the “plan.” In this subjunctive unreality, the “plan” becomes non-existent even as “all move in the same direction.” This concerted movement becomes the alternative to the “intricate maps and useless strategies” in the opening stanza that have become too heavy a burden for the poet-narrator, an alternative to the reduction of the narrator’s body merely to a “weight I am sick of carrying.” In describing what I think of as a tradition of Filipinx-American resurgent tactics, I do not think that I primarily am talking about the category of community art.23 Gamalinda’s description of many-bodied movement and what I am calling resurgent tactics are indebted to yet distinct from the practice of community art. I propose making a weak but hopefully productive distinction between “practice” and “tactic” in order to hold open this difference between an analysis of community-based practice and an analysis of the relation between the artist and colonized history. I am suggesting that we turn to the work of our artists and poets because, tasked with listening to silence or extremely distorted noise from the past, they productively mangle and repurpose colonial language and tools in order to be able to receive messages from the past. Their mode of communicating may seem too obtuse, avantgarde, or “white.” (Filipinx-Americans’ and other people of color’s distrust of elite art institutions and spaces founded on the premise of white supremacy is entirely legitimate.) But I think it is, nonetheless, crucial for us to pay attention to our experimental artists because they can give us ways of accessing a stolen, distorted history while simultaneously reminding us that the past is neither perfectly silent nor perfectly whole. As the historian Leslie M. Harris puts it, the “idea of silence, which is often used in discussion about early African American history, in fact can undermine the significance of our projects of historical recovery by implicitly positing a perfect archive.”24 In other words, the opacity of FilipinxAmerican artists’ methods can constitute an alternate historiography that recognizes but does not fetishize the violence of silence. The concept of resurgent tactics also might give us a third way out of debates about form versus content, in which the work of Filipinx-American artists can get caught up in a maelstrom that either damns or praises them for being too political or too apolitical, depending on whether or not the work contains too much or not enough recognizably Filipinx-American “content.” (Of course, in the mainstream art world, hostility against variously minoritized artists still can take the form of pronouncements that the work is too “political,” which usually means that the work is being deemed “not art” at all, to be contrasted with the eager reception of those who appear not to represent.) But perhaps, more importantly, with the concept of countervisibility as resurgent tactics, we can keep in sight here the tactics that insurgent practices required, not only “in the field” but in daily life. 439

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With the concept of resurgent tactics in relation to the history of American counterinsurgency in the Philippines, what becomes most salient is whether or not the work of the artist activates and connects the “many bodies” of the past with those of the present. For example, I would like to propose that Osterloh’s insistence on turning away from the camera contains a transmitted message, which we can decode with the help of Nerissa Balce’s invaluable scholarship on the violence of the American ethnographic gaze at the “Filipina breast.” Via Balce’s scholarship, Osterloh’s art conveys a message from over a century ago by the objectified faces and bodies of women and girls entrapped by the ethnographic gaze. So the question becomes not so much about anti-colonial resistance—whether or not these women and girls directly fought or resisted colonialism—but rather about what Pexa calls decolonizing acts of “resurgence.”25 In the context of indigenous and First Nations North America, Pexa comes up with the concept of resurgence as a means of revisiting and rereading nineteenth- and twentieth-century works by Dakhóta intellectuals that traditionally have been deemed and dismissed as “assimilationist.” Pexa argues that through a “proliferation of intertexts,” these intellectuals did what they could under tremendous pressure to “preserve Dakhóta difference and density.” Pexa writes: “These intertexts await readers who enter their weblike relations on and off the page. They await cocreators of the Oyáte.”26 Thus, it may not be the idea of the warrior hero whom we should depend upon but rather what Pexa calls the “unheroic decolonizer,” the one who “sustains the life of the people, but whose heroism cannot be celebrated properly in his or her own time.”27 Turning back to the Philippine context, we might ask, what resurgent message from over a century ago might these “many bodies” of women and girls, reduced to their body parts, be sending to the future? To those of us now in our communality who must continue to learn how to decode and decipher? How might we need to pay attention to covert gestures and unheroic resurgence rather than overt heroic acts of resistance? Or the zones of relation between insurgence and resurgence? What I am doing here is nothing new and nothing extraordinary. I am just trying to name what already always was happening. To keep going with our insurgent tactics in order to hear the resurgent past so as to cocreate our decolonized future. Those many bodies await us, my friends.

Notes 1 For a reading of Osterloh’s Press and Outline as the “queer reduplication of self” via the “nature of looped film,” see Jan Christian Bernabe’s essay in the catalogue for Gina Osterloh’s exhibition Nothing To See Here There Never Was at Silverlens Galleries (Makati City: Silverlens, 2015). 2 Oscar Campomanes, “The New Empire’s Forgetful and Forgotten Citizens: Unrepresentability and Unassimilability in Filipino-American Postcolonialities,” Critical Mass, 2, no. 2 (1995): 145–200. 3 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Jodi Kim, Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022); David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). 4 Nerissa Balce, Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images and the American Archive (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016). 5 Sarita Echavez See, The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum (New York: New York University Press, 2017). On the question of irony and the imperial production of images—whether docile or ungovernable—of racial colonial subjects, I thank

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Countervisibility as Resurgent Tactics my editors for their reference to the work of Krista A. Thompson on the deliberate cultivation of images of manageable and picturesque landscapes and peoples by imperial as well as elite postcolonial powers when it comes to the origins of the tourism industry in 1880s Jamaica and the Bahamas. Thompson’s excellent study manages to both narrate the origins and growth of neo/colonial developmental ideology, visual technology, and governmentality and document the material repercussions of those practices for local, especially Black, communities; see Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. This deliberate cultivation of an imperial eye (qua Mary Louise Pratt) in the Anglo-Creole Caribbean does share some similar traits with the emergence of photography and what Nerissa Balce has called the “body parts of empire” in the wake of the American genocidal conquest of the Philippines. However, by contrast, my point about irony is an attempt to intervene in the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century assumption in US critical race and ethnic studies scholarship that the achievement of identitarian visibility is a necessary and positive goal. 6 Nerissa Balce, “The Filipina Breast: Savagery, Docility, and the Erotics of the American Empire,” Social Text, 24, no. 2 (2006): 103. 7 Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 5–6. 8 Critical geneaologies of Black countervisibility include: Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); and Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). There also is increasing scholarly attention to visual representational strategies by Brown migrants who are undocumented; see, for example, Rebecca Schreiber, The Undocumented Everyday: Migrant Lives and the Politics of Visibility. 9 Stephanie Syjuco, Body Double, video installation, 2007. For a range of scholar-critics on Syjuco’s work, see: Jan Christian Bernabe, “Stephanie Syjuco ‘Blows up’: The Black Market Series,” Wasafiri, 28, no. 3 (2013): 24–33; Patrick D. Flores, “Delicacy and Danger,” Third Text, 27, no. 1 (2013): 95–107; and Thea Quiray Tagle, “Salvage Acts: Asian/American Artists and the Uncovering of Slow Violence in the San Francisco Bay Area,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 18, no. 5 (2019): 1112–1127. 10 Siddhata Perez, “Camou, Kamo? (Or: Camouflage, You Say?),” Double Vision, Exhibition Catalogue (Singapore: NUS Museum, 2016), 1. 11 Gina Osterloh in David Lloyd, “Press and Outline: An Interview with Gina Osterloh,” Enclave Review (2019). For an overview of Osterloh’s oeuvre especially in relation to photography and queer studies, see Jan Christian Bernabe’s essay in the exhibition catalogue Nothing To See Here There Never Was, Silverlens Galleries (2015). 12 Silverlens catalogue for Gina Osterloh’s solo exhibition Zones at Silverlens Galleries, Makati City, Philippines in 2018. Interview of Osterloh by Janis Butler Holm. 13 For a particularly poignant autobiographical account of biracial subjectivity that is both intimate and extensively historicized, see Hazel Carby’s monograph Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2019), particularly the chapter “Where Are You From.” 14 Gina Osterloh, Silverlens catalogue, 2018, 43. 15 Gina Osterloh, Press and Outline, black and white 16mm film loop, no audio, TRT: 5 minutes 30 seconds. 2014. http://ginaosterloh.com/work/press-and-outline. Accessed August 18, 2020. 16 Bernabe, Nothing, n.p.; Annie Buckley, “Critics’ Picks” review of Gina Osterloh’s solo exhibition at Francois Ghebaly, Artforum (2014): https://www.artforum.com/picks/gina-osterloh-47653. Accessed August 19, 2020). 17 Christopher Pexa, Translation Nation: Rewriting the Dakhóta Oyáte (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), xi. Pexa uses the concept of the “pause” in Dakhóta temporality to describe literally the “marking off of narrative and economic sufficiency” during the winter; and figuratively “their interrupting the ‘progressive’ temporality of U.S. capital and settler-colonial expansion” (238). 18 The United States Army and Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007); Christopher Paul, Colin P. Clarke, Beth Grill, and Molly Dunigan. “Philippines (Huk Rebellion), 1946–1956: Case Outcome: COIN Win,” Paths to Victory: Detailed Insurgency Case Studies (Pittsburgh: RAND Corporation, 2013), 31–39; and The United States Army and Marine Corps, Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 2014). For historical and cultural analyses of the “case” of insurgency and

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Sarita Echavez See counterinsurgency the Philippines specifically and then in relation to broader patterns of the US empire, see Alfred McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); Joseph Darda, Empire of Defense: Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019); and Dylan Rodríguez, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). 19 During a February 2009 talk on a panel organized by Jacquline Francis as part of the College Art Association’s annual conference, Osterloh referenced the influence of Roger Callois’s writing about the praying mantis and its use of camouflage, particularly the way the “environment is writing onto the object’s skin.” 20 In addition to Nerissa Balce’s aforementioned Body Parts of Empire, see the following for a sample of the book-length studies of the impact of the Philippine-American War on American popular culture, e.g. novels, memoirs, still and moving images, food, postcards, news, and world fairs: Benito Vergara, Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th-Century Philippines (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1995); Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Sharon Delmendo, The Star-Entangled Banner: One Hundred Years of America in the Philippines (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Meg Wesling, Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and U.S. Imperialism in the Philippines (New York: New York University Press, 2011); René Alexander Orquiza, Jr., Taste of Control: Food and the Filipino Colonial Mentality under American Rule (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020). 21 Eric Gamalinda, Amigo Warfare (Cherry Grove Collections,  2007). http://www.ericgamalinda. com/amigo-warfare.html. Accessed August 25, 2020. See also Scott Hightower’s review of Gamalinda’s Amigo Warfare in Coldfront (January 16, 2009). http://coldfrontmag.com/amigo-warfare/ Accessed August 25, 2020. 22 See also Eileen Tabios’s critical work compiling these reviews of Gamalinda’s work (including Tabios’s own review). 23 Collectivist principles and practices pervade and define many Filipinx-American community-based art projects. The long-standing practice of muralists like Johanna Poethig and the more recent digital “pop-up” approach of poets like Jason Magabo Perez exemplify the wide range and p ­ owerful vitality of collaborative processes and projects embedded in and arising out of communitybased art activism. So I do find it important to acknowledge that, for readers aware of that longstanding history, it may seem like I am taking a long and unnecessarily circuitous detour to describe community art or what also has been called “social practice,” “relational aesthetics,” and “new genre public art.” The art historian Rebecca Zorach defines this work as that of “professional artists [who] enter communities of non-artists and enjoin their participation, with the goal of channeling some truthful representation of community feeling, and thereby promotion social cohesion”; see Rebecca Zorach, Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965–1975 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 8. The category of “community art” or “community arts” (plural with an “s”) generally has attracted derision from both activists and fine arts authorities and establishments. But in her study of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, Zorach argues that Black Arts Movement practitioners should be “understood as the inventors of ‘social practice’ before there was a fashionable art world term for it” (16). Indeed, Zorach archly observes that “it is actually art that is not community art that requires explanation: artists have always worked within communities” (8). In her essay “Starting from Mexico: Estridentismo as an Avant-Garde Model,” the art historian Tatiana Flores proposes yet another alternate genealogy of “social practice” (and other phrases designating art as activism) that “could certainly start from Mexico” rather than originate in the United States or Europe (63); see Tatiana Flores, “Starting from Mexico: Estridentismo as an Avant-Garde Model,” World Art, 4, no. 1 (2014): 47–65. In so doing, Flores disrupts what she calls the “Euro(pe)centric narrative” of the origins of contemporary socially committed art (page 50); replaces that hegemonic narrative with an alternate narrative that originates first with the Estridentismo movement and then the ¡30-30! movement in post-revolutionary Mexico City of the 1920s, with special attention to latter’s collectivist ethos; and, hence, opens up the possibility of plural and “dissident modernisms” (63). For further reading, see Tatiana Flores, Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30–30! (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

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Countervisibility as Resurgent Tactics 24 Leslie M. Harris, “Imperfect Archives and the Historical Imagination,” Public Historian, XXXVI, no. 1 (February 2014): 77–80 (quotation, 79); quoted in Sophie White, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 225. 25 Pexa notes that he is drawing on Jeff Corntassel and Mick Scow’s notion of “everyday acts of resurgence” (quoted in Pexa, Translated Nation, 20). 26 Pexa, Translated Nation, 13. 27 Ibid., 4.

Selected Bibliography Nerissa Balce, Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images and the American Archive (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016). Oscar Campomanes, “The New Empire’s Forgetful and Forgotten Citizens: Unrepresentability and Unassimilability in Filipino-American Postcolonialities,” Critical Mass 2, no. 2 (1995): 145–200. Eric Gamalinda, Amigo Warfare (Cincinnati, OH: Cherry Grove Collections, 2007). Alfred McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). Gina Osterloh, Press and Outline, black and white 16mm film loop, no audio, TRT: 5 minutes 30 seconds. 2014. Christopher Pexa, Translation Nation: Rewriting the Dakhóta Oyáte (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Dylan Rodríguez, Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Sarita Echavez See, The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum (New York: New York University Press, 2017). Stephanie Syjuco, Body Double, video installation, 2007. Krista Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

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SECTION V

Living and Loving

34 “SHE CARRIED WITH HER … A LARGE BUNDLE OF WEARING APPAREL BELONGING TO HERSELF” Slave Dress as Resistance in Portraiture and Fugitive Slave Advertisements Charmaine A. Nelson Introduction While living on the Caribbean Island of St. Vincent in the eighteenth century, the AngloIrish special magistrate John Colthurst participated in the deliberate and abject humiliation of an enslaved woman named Dutchess. Colthurst’s diary recounts his encounter with Dutchess in a crowded local courthouse where people had gathered to hear the details of her supposed crimes, the theft of money with which she purchased an array of beautiful items of dress. Her alleged misdeeds call us to contemplate several interconnected domains of transatlantic slavery including slave dress, cultural preservation, and self-determination, and more specifically, the experiences of enslaved people of African descent. None of these can be fully understood outside of the intersecting web of sex, gender, and racial identities within the “peculiar institution,” as slavery was known. The first domain – slave dress – entails a contemplation of how the enslaved acquired the means and materials to adorn, protect, and beautify their bodies amidst endemic material deprivation, cultural prohibitions, economic disenfranchisement, and pervasive physical violence. Given these forces, the second domain – cultural preservation – was never within the full control of the enslaved, but rather, their ability to preserve or adapt their African cultural practices were ostensibly dictated by white society. Therefore, the third domain – self-determination – was neither an individual nor a community right, but a constant point of resistance and struggle. Taken together these three domains are my starting point for a comparison of slave dress in tropical, slave majority sites like the Caribbean island colonies of St. Vincent and Jamaica and temperate, slave minority sites like Canada. In what follows I present several examples of what a decolonial practice of Art History can achieve. I analyze one dominant form of “high” art, oil portraiture, and two “low” art forms, print advertising and dress. However, my choices of artist and sitter for the portrait, a slave-owning white man and an enslaved Black woman, respectively, allow me to 447

DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-40

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interrogate the under-acknowledged racial biases of the genre which too easily occasioned violent encounters for Black sitters. Print and dress have typically been excluded from art historical contemplation due to the mass production, wide circulation, group production, and low cost in the first instance, and to the quotidian nature in the latter. In thinking through evidence of slave resistance in print culture and dress, several academic norms are destabilized. First, within a field, Slavery Studies, which is dominated by historians who typically focus upon resistance as flight or rebellion, I wish to highlight the understudied cultural dimensions of slave resistance. Second, my focus on dress and print culture (and the representation of the former in the latter) contributes to the democratization of Art History through a continuing interrogation of what constitutes art. As both a focus of control by enslavers and of resistance by the enslaved, slave dress reveals its significance as a site of contestation as well as private pleasures and self-care and public cultural expression, preservation, and transformation. Accordingly, then, third, my centering of the experiences of enslaved people like Dutchess depends upon acknowledging them as cultural producers and people who challenged their pervasive colonial misrepresentation.

Dutchess’s Day in Court While Dutchess’s “clothing acts”1 were demonstrations of her resistance, her court appearance was a retaliatory ordeal at the hands of a violent white legal system that defined enslaved people as chattel. Accused of stealing money, not for basic sustenance and selfpreservation, but for beautification, self-care and what could be called pleasure, Dutchess was charged with using her supposedly ill-gotten gains to purchase elegant clothing. As Colthurst asserted, the items included, Wearing apparel fine enough for a Princess … Their colours vied with those of the rainbow, first a flaming bright yellow bonnet, flashy dresses without number, necklaces and earrings without ends, rose coloured silk stocking and two pairs of pink satin shoes!!2 Notably the desire for luxurious articles of dress appeared ridiculous to upper-class white sensibilities when the intended wearers were enslaved field labourers, socially and physically distanced from elite white women. For the nineteenth-century white citizens who packed the courthouse to gloat at Dutchess’s humiliation, the desire to transcend her enslaved status and to adorn her body in ways that acknowledged her beauty, was as the scholar Rebecca Earle has noted, incongruous at best or repellant at worst. Enslaved and free Black people were certainly aware of the class mobility, however tenuous, that clothing could provide. Examples of slave escape often hinged upon the dramatic alteration of the enslaved person’s clothing to pass as a free person. But Dutchess’s preferences of dress do not appear to be about resistance as flight, but about resistance as self-care, or assertions of individuality and humanity. At the heart of Dutchess’s story is white society’s failure to see enslaved Black females as women or as feminine outside of their reproductive capacities as breeders of new “slaves.” Indeed, routinely deprived of sufficient and diversified nutrition and laboring gruelling hours at backbreaking tasks, enslaved men and women across the Americas were customarily underweight, exceptionally muscular, and in the tropics, deeply and constantly tanned 448

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compared to upperclass, leisurely whites. How the nature of their lives transformed the bodies of enslaved Black women opened a vast gulf between themselves and the ideals of white feminine beauty which people like Colthurst naturalized. But Dutchess’s story does not merely expose the rift between the gendered expectations and performances of middle- and upper-class whites and enslaved and impoverished Blacks, but the animalization of the latter by the former. The use of terms like wool and hooves to describe the hair and feet of black people was common. As Colthurst recounted, when Dutchess was forced to try on the shoes in front of the packed courtroom, those assembled “shouted when the pink satins were placed upon the hoofs of Dutchess. In truth I never saw anything as unsuitable as the satins to such feet.”3 Colthurst’s cruelty is palpable, and we can only imagine Dutchess’s utter humiliation as the target of such public venom and ridicule. Arguably, Dutchess had a clear desire to transcend the drudgery, pain, and stark material disenfranchisement of her enslavement by acquiring beautiful clothing and jewelry with which to adorn her body. Her bid to escape, if only fleetingly, the crushing obscenity of slavery illuminates the dress norms of many Caribbean colonies like Jamaica. In the wealthy, plantation-riddled British colony, it was customary for enslaved women to be provided with once-yearly rations of oznaburgh – a plain woven flax fabric – with which they were forced to make clothing for the entire enslaved population of their respective plantations.4 This labor was on top of their most common labor as agricultural field workers on the innumerable plantations – mainly cultivating sugar – which dotted the island.5 According to Lucille Mair, in Jamaica, “In 1832, sugar employed 49.5 per cent of the slave work force. Most of those workers were women, the ratio being 920 males to 1,000 females.”6 Despite the imposition of the fabric rations, the ingenuity and resourcefulness of enslaved women resulted in creative outcomes. Through the production and use of dyes and perfumes (made from musk wood and rosewood) and the manufacture of natural material like lacebark (from the laghetto tree), enslaved Jamaicans found ways to assert their individuality through their dress cultures.7 Although oznaburgh fabric was also imported to Canada,8 unlike those held in bondage in Jamaica, enslaved Blacks in Canada wore a diverse range of clothing and fabrics, and a unique slave dress is illusive because the enslaved typically wore their enslavers’ secondhand clothing.9 As such, Canadian slave dress, frequently described in Canadian fugitive slave notices, was constantly recounted as old, worn, discolored, and daubed with paint.10 Initially placed to hunt and re-enslave people, such advertisements have become one of the best sources for understanding the appearance, actions, and dress of the enslaved; this because enslavers were so desperate to recuperate their missing “property” that they willingly disclosed often invasive details, unhelpful in their bid to define human beings as chattel and slavery as a “civilizing mission.” While many enslaved people wore typical European clothing, there are also glimpses of African cultural preservation. A fugitive slave advertisement placed on 14 May 1767 by the Montreal vintner James Crofton offered a reward for Andrew described as “remarkable for being clean dress’d and wearing a Handkerchief tied round his Head,”11 (sic) a description of the African dress practice known as headwrapping. Often associated with Black women in the Caribbean, headwrapping survived the Middle Passage to be adapted for both functional and beautification purposes. It also became a tool of social distinction through which Black and mixed-race women demarcated their bodies within a social landscape in which complexion was not securely conflated with social status. 449

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Marie-Thérèse-Zémire The French-Canadian François Malépart de Beaucourt’s 1786 oil portrait also sheds light on slave dress, cultural retention, and the violence of artistic representation. Originally circulated as Portrait of a Negro Slave and Negress, it was renamed Portrait of a Haitian Woman in 2011, a move that I protested for the way it retroactively liberated the enslaved Black sitter and evacuated the work of ties to Canadian slavery (see Figure 34.1).12 Depicting an enslaved, dark-skinned female sitter, offering a tray of tropical fruit strategically juxtaposed with the orchestrated exposure of her breast, the sitter’s smile acts to twin the offering of food with body/sexuality, implying her complicity in her hyper-sexualization. The portrait’s anomalous nature resides in the facts that it is a fully finished, professionally rendered, individual representation of a specific enslaved subject, and the only known “high” art rendering of an enslaved person in Canada. Importantly, it is also the only known visual representation of the African dress practice of headwrapping in the context of Canadian slavery for which – unlike the USA, Cuba, and Brazil – the photographic archive only depicts free Black people.13 This image of an enslaved female cannot be thoroughly interpreted and understood without a rigorous exploration of historical Western “high” art portraiture and the institution of slavery. Historical and contemporary insights shed light on the role that class has

Figure 34.1  François Malépart de Beaucourt, Portrait of a Haitian Woman (formerly Portrait of a Negro Slave until 2011) (1786), oil on canvas, 72.7  × 58.5  cm., M12067, McCord Museum, Montreal.

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traditionally played in “high” art portraiture and the identity politics and power dynamics at the heart of slavery. In the first instance in 1796, the Earl of Fife issued the following lament, before this century, very few people presented themselves to a painter, except those who were of great families, or remarkable for their actions in service to the country, or some other extraordinary circumstance … as lately … every body (sic) almost who can afford twenty pounds, has the portraits of himself, wife and children painted.14 (Italics mine) Clearly, Fife did not support the democratization of the genre for the ways that the increased affordability opened it up to sitters who he deemed to be unworthy. Portraits are of course about individuality and specificity, and Fife’s great families were people who wished to be remembered as individuals. As such, traditionally the title of a portrait is the sitter’s name. However, with unfree people, the practice has instead been to render Black sitters anonymous in titles with terms like “dark,” “Black,” “Negro,” “mulatto,” and “slave” and, in conversation pieces with white subjects, to present them as compositionally abject, foreign, and laboring bodies. Hilary McD. Beckles’ more recent contemplation of the power imbalances between enslaver and enslaved, also informs an understanding of Beaucourt’s depiction of this enslaved black female. As Beckles has incisively argued, Neither colonial statutes or slave codes, then, invested slaves with any rights over their own bodies, but rather transferred and consolidated such rights within the legal person of the slaveowners. This direct translation of legal entitlement into social power and authority meant that white men especially were located at a convergence where the racial, sexual, and class domination of slave women provided a totality of terror and tyranny.15 (italics mine) Troublingly, Beaucourt exemplified the threat of social power which Beckles so ably articulated since he was at once the artist, the patron, and the enslaver. Detailed records compiled by Marcel Trudel reveal the likely sitter as Marie-Thérèse-Zémire, one of two enslaved Black people documented as the property of the artist’s white wife, Benoite Gaétant.16 Identified as a négresse, she was listed in legal documents as belonging to the widow of the painter after his death.17 According to Frank Mackey, Marie was 25 in April 1796 and 29 at her death on 15 December 1800.18 Therefore, she would have been 15 when the portrait was painted in 1786. The couple met and married in the 1770s or 1780s when Beaucourt studied at the Bordeaux Academy in France, after which they travelled to St. Domingue (the western third of the Caribbean Island of Hispaniola), arriving during the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), before returning to Montreal via Philadelphia in 1792.19 St. Domingue, France’s richest colony built upon sugar cultivation and other plantation mono-crop agriculture, had by this time become exceptionally lethal for enslaved Africans. Malick W. Ghachem argues that in the 1780s, “During their first three to five years of labor in Saint-Domingue, newly purchased Africans died on average at a rate of 50 percent.”20 Although Beaucourt depicted Marie as a domestic, a world typically inhabited by light skinned, or mixed race enslaved people, Marie’s darker complexion corresponded to that of field laborers, making it likely that she was from a neighbouring plantation in 451

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Cap François (now Cap Haitien), a busy center of sugar export, where the Beaucourts temporarily resided. Marie’s anonymization in the title stems from her marginalized status in Quebec and St. Domingue (Haiti). Typically created over a period of sittings, it is customary that the portraitist knows the name of their sitter and that the portrait, the sitter’s likeness, was normally named after them. The sitter was traditionally also the patron or a relation or affiliate thereof, and as such, had control over the commission and their likeness. In contrast, portraits of the enslaved turned the traditional western practice on its pretty elitist head. Marie was not the patron of the artwork and, as the legal property of the couple, had no control over her likeness and no say over whether she wished to pose for Beaucourt at all or in this fashion, with her breast exposed.21 The sexually charged nature of the portrait highlights the precarious status of enslaved Black females and their vulnerability to sexual predation.22 We should also consider how the portrait would have reinforced the possibility of Marie’s real-life scrutiny and sexual violation since she likely worked as a domestic in the home (and studio) of the artist (especially once in Canada), moving through spaces where the Beaucourts and François’s clients saw her juxtaposed with her painted exposed body. Again, the nature of this “high” art portrait and the seeming enslavement and impoverishment of the sitter makes it completely unlikely that the Black woman either commissioned or owned the painting. Rather, it is far more likely that Beaucourt kept the painting for his own social, cultural, economic, and sexual ends.23 Marie’s potential discomfort, shame, and fear within such a scenario must have been psychologically devastating. As the patron, the artist, and the enslaver, Beaucourt embodied an astonishing and dangerous convergence of cultural, social, and legal authority, which was arguably manifested in its most explicit material form in the object of the painting itself. Not merely attributable to his occupation and professionalization as a European-trained painter, it was Beaucourt’s (and his wife’s) social status and identity as upper-class whites which allowed him to purchase another human being and to demand that she sit for him in the compromised fashion in which he dictated. Peculiarly then, this portrait circumvented the traditional artist-patron relationship effectively disempowering the sitter, who would not have had the ability to contest her representation without penalty. Ironically, I would argue that Beaucourt’s so-called portrait of Marie’s body as exposed Black skin and smiling face did not and could never have accurately captured her likeness. It does not – and would never have been designed to – capture what I imagine to be her sorrow, shame, remorse, and pain at being exploited against her will in this way. Where then do we look for Marie in a portrait that was not about Marie? To look for Marie, not as a body, but as an identity – culture, desires, and potentially even choices – is, I believe, to look at her headwrap and the fruit still life. The headwrap, a West African dress practice that survived the Middle Passage, was passed down to enslaved Creoles by their Africanborn ancestors as self-care and adornment. Decoding the material and aesthetic nature of Marie’s – again not that of a “field slave” – may allow us to consider how she inserted her cultural identity into the otherwise violent scene of the portrait. As the scholar of Jamaican slave dress Steeve O. Buckridge has ably argued, under the force of white cultural annihilation, cultural expression became a survival strategy for the enslaved.24 Viewing slave dress as a spectrum of possibilities between accommodation and resistance, Buckridge contends that dress was one area over which enslaved Blacks were able to exert some influence, preserving and adapting African aesthetics and practices. 452

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To this end, the brightly coloured, neat, and precisely tied headwrap that adorns Marie’s head is a sign of African cultural preservation and resistance in the face of white oppression, material evidence of the continuation of African dress heritage, and its evolution, across the Atlantic, across centuries. Furthermore, Buckridge positions the headwrap or tie-head as a pervasive symbol of resistance with immense communicative power that took on many coded forms across a range of diasporic locations.25 Headwraps were a communal aesthetic language of beautification through which the enslaved signalled status, ethnicity, class, labor, maternity, and kinship relations, as well as a practical tool to balance loads, hide unkempt and lice-infested hair and facial wounds, guard against heat, rain, and dirt, and to style one’s hair. Marie’s headwrap appears to have more symbolic and beautifying functions rather than practical ones, although the latter is certainly still possible. This is conveyed in part by the brilliantly coloured, eye-catching fabric, its seeming refinement (the quality and texture of the fabric), and its positioning. It reads more as a prized possession than a means of disguising or camouflaging the head. Madeleine Major-Frégeau has described the fruit as: ananas (pineapple), pomme-­ cannelle (sugar apple) on the marble slab, and noix de cajou (cashew nut) in front of the pineapple and oranges.26 The sugar apple grows in tropical or semi-tropical climates and was originally known to South America, Central America, Southern Mexico, the ­Caribbean and dry regions of North Queensland, Australia. All the fruits were foreign to the temperate climate of Quebec, Beaucourt’s home, and impossible to cultivate naturally (that is, outside of a greenhouse) in the region. Therefore, most of the white citizens of Quebec would never have tasted any of the still life’s tropical fruits outside of candied or preserved forms. Since Marie was likely from a region in which the fruit was typically grown, she was also assuredly far more familiar with their nutritional and medicinal uses than the artist. Both the cashew nut and sugar apple were used as food and medicinally. In a portrait created because of, and memorializing, a vast power imbalance (if not outright coercion), one area through which Marie may have exerted some degree of significant, if during the moment of production, undetectable control, was in the selection and staging of the fruit still life. I want to suggest then that the sugar apple’s exclusion from the platter held by Marie may be instructive since, although the flesh of the pods inside of the green skin is edible, the seeds themselves, acrid and poisonous, were used by enslaved females as an abortifacient in their resistance against breeding and sexual violence. According to Londa Schiebinger, the knowledgeable use of vegetation, herbs, and fruits for reproductive resistance to prohibit impregnation or induce an abortion thereafter – commonly demeaned as “folk medicine” by white colonizers and enslavers – was widespread throughout the European colonies amongst women of African descent in the eighteenth century.27 Many historical European fruit and food still life paintings, often bountiful (even excessive) spreads, imply that the feasters have come and gone, leaving a mess for the domestics to tend. About the possessions and decadence that wealth ensures, the immediacy of consumption is often indicated by the presence of peeled citrus or variously opened fruit ready for eating. Set apart from this tradition, the fruit that Marie carries has not yet been readied for consumption. Furthermore, her enslaved status signals that she is intended to prepare, not to eat the delicacies. Clearly, this portrait was never intended for Marie as a patron, who would almost certainly not have had the money or the cultural capital to commission such an artwork, and a separate and suitable home in which to install it. 453

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Headwrapping in Quebec and Nova Scotia Headwrapping was also described in another Canadian fugitive slave advertisement printed on 18 June 1776 in Nova Scotia for the return of a “Negro Women named FLORIMELL.”28 (sic) The anonymous notice recorded the day (June 10) and time (“between the Hours of 9 and 10 at Night”) that Florimell had escaped, revealing her heightened surveillance. While her clothing was a blend of female and male items (a gown, petticoat, and men’s shoes), the notice also stated that “she commonly wears a Handkerchief round her Head.”29 But unlike the mixed race, African American Creole Andrew, signs point to Florimell’s Africanness. Besides her headwrapping, Florimell also purportedly had “Scars in her Face” and spoke “broken English.”30 Although enslavers often described the scars which riddled an enslaved person’s body, from corporal punishment, harsh labor conditions, accidents, and illness, Florimell’s scars may have been the product of the ritual-based community marks of scarification. Known as “country marks” by enslavers, the African cultural practice of scarification – the custom of marking the flesh to create aesthetic patterns with specific ethnic and community meaning – was outlawed within one generation of African arrival in the ­ ­Americas. T ­ ogether with her headwrapping and broken English, an uncommon occurrence for ­enslaved Creoles in Nova Scotia, the three signs point to Florimell’s likely African birth. Cash shared more with the enslaved Vincentian woman Dutchess than either of her Canadian counterparts. Under the headline “RAN-AWAY” in the 4 November 1779 Quebec Gazette, the Quebec City tailor Hugh Ritchie detailed his hunt for the 26-year-old fluently bilingual (English and French) “Negro Wench named CASH” who had escaped alongside an 18-year-old “Negro Lad named NEMO”31 (see Figure 34.2). What links Cash to Dutchess is the type and amount of the clothing with which she absconded, described as “a large bundle of wearing apparel … consisting of a black sattin Cloak, Caps, Bonnets, Ruffles, Ribbons, six or seven Petticoats, a pair of old Stays, and many other articles of value which cannot be ascertained.”32 (sic). Like Dutchess, Cash’s bundle was comprised of refined pieces of dress, commonly associated with white women. Also, like Dutchess, Cash’s escape forces us to think about her not merely as a “slave” but as a person seeking her freedom, who understood her real value as a human and as a woman who thought about how she adorned her body. Cash’s departure, with an excessively feminine and refined bundle of clothing, also speaks to Black female defiance of the flattening of gender within transatlantic slavery, through the imposition of masculine labour and dress, like Florimell’s “Men’s Shoes.”33 Given Hugh Ritchie’s occupation as a tailor, it is likely that the labor he stole from Cash was related to his business and that Cash rightfully understood the clothing with which she escaped as her own. Indeed, even Ritchie conceded as much when he noted that Cash’s collection of clothing “belong[ed] to herself.”34

Conclusion Like the fugitive slave advertisements, the oil painting of Marie was an unauthorized, stolen likeness. The two types of visual culture – one “high art,” exclusive, coveted, and expensive, and the other popular, mass-produced, widely circulated, and ephemeral – ­nevertheless, were both exploited by enslavers to dehumanize and objectify the enslaved in ways which profited the white enslaver; in the first case as a calling-card for Beaucourt’s newly honed, European training which could attract new clientele in Montreal, and in the

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Figure 34.2  Hugh Ritchie, “RAN-AWAY,” Quebec Gazette, 4 November 1779, vol. 740, p. 3; ­Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BANQ), Montreal, Canada.

latter, to identify and criminalize the enslaved to incentivize the public’s willing participation in their recapture. These histories of slave dress and its representation are inseparable from the identities and experiences of the enslaved who existed within an oppressive system within which whites exerted sadistic control over all aspects of their lives. Dress then became a way to assert one’s individuality and humanity, to insist that “I am human” and “I belong to myself” in a world where the enslaved were legally classed as moveable personal property. The fact that Dutchess, Andrew, Florimell, and Cash affirmed both declarations is why we can recover their names and deeds today.

Notes 1 Rebecca Earle, “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!’: Race, Clothing and Identity in The Americas (17th–19th Centuries),” History Workshop Journal 1: no. 52 (August 2001): 177. 2 John Colthurst, The Colthurst Journal; Journal of a Special Magistrate in the Islands of Barbados and St. Vincent July 1835 – September 1838, ed. Woodville Marshall (Millwood: kto Press, 1977), 121–22; cited in Earle, “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!’,” 178. 3 Earle, “Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!,” 179. 4 Reverend R. Bickell, The West Indies as They Are: Or a Real Picture of Slavery: But More Particularly as It Exists in the Island of Jamaica, in three parts with notes (London: Printed for J. Hatchard and Son, 187 Piccadilly: and Lupton Relfe, Cornhill, 1825), 54.

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Charmaine A. Nelson 5 Lucille Mathurin Mair, “Women Field Workers in Jamaica during Slavery,” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000). 6 Lucille Mathurin Mair, “Women Field Workers in Jamaica during Slavery,” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000), 390. 7 Steeve O. Buckridge, “The Role of Plant Substances in Jamaican Dress,” Caribbean Quarterly 49, no. 3 (September 2003): 62, 63, 65, 68. 8 Andrew Cuenod, “Andrew Cuenod, Hath Lately IMPORTED from London and Cork, &c.,” Nova-Scotia Chronicle and Weekly Advertiser 1, no. 38 (Tuesday 12 September to Tuesday 19 September 1769): 303. 9 Frank Mackey, “Appendix I: Newspaper Notices,” Done with Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal 1760–1840 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 307–340. See the descriptions of slave dress in the fugitive slave advertisements transcribed in the appendix. 10 Mackey, “Appendix I: Newspaper Notices,” 307–340. 11 James Crofton, “RUN-AWAY, from James Crofton,” Quebec Gazette, 14 May 1767; transcribed in Mackey, “Appendix I: Newspaper Notices,” 315. 12 Charmaine A. Nelson, “Representing the enslaved African in Montreal,” Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (London: Routledge, 2016), 111–133. Beaucourt, the son of a French soldier and amateur painter, was born on 25 February 1740 in La Prairie, Quebec, and died in Montreal 24 June 1794. François enrolled at the Académie de peinture, sculpture et architecture civile et navale in Bordeaux in 1775, to which he was elected in 1784. Barry Lord has indicated that the addition of the de by François to his last name was an aristocratic pretension which reveals the painter’s class aspirations. Donald Blake Webster, Georgian Canada: Conflict and Culture 1745–1820 (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1984), 141, Barry Lord, Painting in Canada: Toward a People’s History (Toronto: NC Press, 1974), 31–32 and Jacques Des Rochers, “Portrait of a Haitian Woman: A Loan from the McCord Museum,” M: The Magazine of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (September–December 2011), 15. 13 This is because Canadian abolition came into effect with British abolition in 1834, before photography had been made widely accessible through a convenient and affordable process. 14 Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 2. 15 Hilary McD. Beckles, “Property Rights in Pleasure: The Marketing of Enslaved Women’s Sexuality,” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000), 693. 16 Trudel lists the artist and his wife’s family name as Beacours. The other enslaved person is listed as a male, Jean-Baptiste-François nègre, who was reportedly baptised on 14 April 1791 at the approximate age of 14. Since he was only nine years old when François painted Marie, this likely rules out a romantic relationship between them. See: Marcel Trudel, Dictionnaire des Esclaves et de leurs Propriétaires au Canada Français (La Salle: Éditions Hurtubise HMH Ltée, 1990), 105, 379. Mackey, Done with Slavery, 72. 17 Trudel, Dictionnaire des esclaves, 114, 379. Trudel also claimed that Marie was buried on 16 December 1800 at l’Hôpital-Général. 18 Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 466 (note # 13).   Mackey’s sources were: BANQ, register of Hôpital-Général chapel, 16 December 1800; HDM, Hôtel-Dieu de Montreal, admission registers, Book E, 19 April 1796. 19 We can track the Beaucourts’ movements through his newspaper advertisements in Philadelphia for artistic patronage. 20 Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 36. Ghachem calculations did not include the mortality rates of the Middle Passage, which he estimates for French ships at the rate of 13%. At the time, the transit time between Africa and the French Caribbean was an average of 70 days. 21 For a fuller discussion of the meanings and implications of the exposed breast in the portrait see: Charmaine A. Nelson, “Racing Childhood: Representations of Black Girls in Canadian Art,” and

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Slave Dress as Resistance in Portraiture and Slave Advertisements “The Fruits of Resistance: Reading Portrait of a Negro Slave on the Sly,” Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art (New York: Routledge, 2010). 22 Since the children born to enslaved females, regardless of the social status of the father, became the property of their enslavers, slavery created an economic incentive for the endemic sexual exploitation of Black women and girls. So-called natural increase was of course not natural at all, but involved deliberate sexual exploitation, through rape, concubinage, and coercion. See: Herbert S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman, “Fertility Differentials between Slaves in the United States and the British West Indies: A Note on Lactation Practices and Their Possible Implications,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 35, no. 2 (April 1978): 357–374; Richard H. Steckel, “Birth Weights and Infant Mortality among American Slaves,” Explorations in Economic History 23 (April 1986): 173–198; Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999); Hilary McD. Beckles, “Property Rights in Pleasure: The Marketing of Enslaved Women’s Sexuality,” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Limited, 2000) and Charmaine A. Nelson, “Racing Childhood: Representations of Black Girls in Canadian Art,” Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art (New York: Routledge, 2010). 23 Beaucourt’s wife may have inherited the painting since the inventory compiled after Beaucourt’s death and before her second marriage to Gabriel Franchère lists “six paintings” (six tableaux).   Inventory and Wedding Contract for Benoit dit Gaetan Bnigne, 19 June 1810, Faubourg SaintJoseph, Montreal, prepared by Notary Louis Huguet-Latour, Inventaires après décès de la région de Montréal, 1791–1840, Centre d’archives de Montréal, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. I am grateful to Ariane Côté who translated these complex historical texts from French to English. 24 Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 17. 25 Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 86–94. 26 Major-Frégeau, La vie et l’oeuvre, 60. 27 Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 181. 28 Anonymous,” RAN AWAY,” Nova Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle, 18 June 1776, no. 303; British Library Newspapers, London, UK. 29 Anonymous,” RAN AWAY,” Nova Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle, 18 June 1776, no. 303; British Library Newspapers, London, UK. 30 Anonymous,” RAN AWAY,” Nova Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle, 18 June 1776, no. 303; British Library Newspapers, London, UK. 31 Hugh Ritchie, “RAN-AWAY,” Quebec Gazette, 4 November 1779; transcribed in Mackey, “­Appendix I: Newspaper Notices,” 323. 32 Hugh Ritchie, “RAN-AWAY,” Quebec Gazette, 4 November 1779; transcribed in Mackey, “­Appendix I: Newspaper Notices,” 323. 33 Anonymous,” RAN AWAY,” Nova Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle, 18 June 1776, no. 303. 34 Hugh Ritchie, “RAN-AWAY,” Quebec Gazette, 4 November 1779; transcribed in Mackey, “­Appendix I: Newspaper Notices,” 323.

Selected Bibliography Beckles, Hilary McD. “Property Rights in Pleasure: The Marketing of Enslaved Women’s Sexuality,” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000. Buckridge, Steeve O. “The Role of Plant Substances in Jamaican Dress,” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3 (September 2003), pp. 61–73. Earle, Rebecca. “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!’: Race, Clothing and Identity in The Americas (17th – 19th Centuries),” History Workshop Journal 1, no. 52 (October 2001), pp. 175–195. Ghachem, Malick W. The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Lord, Barry. Painting in Canada: Toward a People’s History. Toronto: NC Press, 1974. Mackey, Frank. “Appendix I: Newspaper Notices,” in Done with Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal 1760–1840. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010.

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Charmaine A. Nelson Mair, Lucille Mathurin. “Women Field Workers in Jamaica During Slavery,” in Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000. Nelson, Charmaine A. “The Fruits of Resistance: Reading Portrait of a Negro Slave on the Sly,” ­Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art. New York: Routledge, 2010. Pointon, Marcia. Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century ­England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Trudel, Marcel, Dictionnaire des Esclaves et de leurs Propriétaires au Canada Français. La Salle: ­Éditions Hurtubise HMH Ltée, 1990.

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35 RINA BANERJEE’S DECOLONIAL ECOLOGIES Rebecca M. Brown

In a lecture in May 2020, Patrick Flores, Manila-based art historian and curator, articulated an underlying truth within the study of contemporary art histories, regardless of location or subject matter, namely the strong ties of continuity between the colonial and the contemporary.1 For Flores, this happens both through aesthetic echoes from the past and through the history of violences and ruptures of the colonial era that continue into the present. These are, for Flores, always already imbricated with the flows of global capitalism, as found both in nineteenth-century colonial relations and in today’s vast gulfs of economic privilege. Capital, as Marx has fundamentally shown, works only through circulation, through flow: one must throw it back into circulation to enable it to return magically grown, larger, enhanced. And this growth could not happen without the historical asymmetries of colonialism that continue in the flows of contemporary global capital. This colonial-in-the-now, and the flow of goods, of currency (in the form of cloth, spice, cowrie, gold, lapis, jewelry), of debt, includes at its core the movement of people, in longer and shorter relocations and dislocations, both violently forced and economically pressured. Flow also, as we experience every few years with each new global epidemic, brings contagion, invasive species, viral infection, and pandemic. We traffic in goods, in animals, in plants, and we bring new bugs and invisible alien species into environments far from their homes where they interrupt the workings of ecosystems—sometimes violently, and sometimes helpfully. This colonial legacy also shapes the ways in which we, as scholars, frame questions and pursue research projects. Records of colonial empires favor the voices of the occupying forces, and the cultural artifacts that survive have often been selected and cared for through weighted regimes of colonial exploitation, destruction, and pillage. In addition to active erasures, art history has also had to contend with a history of blindness to visual culture ignored due to its lack of “quality” or its illegibility to disciplinary approaches. Those working on, for example, Bengali kantha, or India’s calendar art, or the performance and artistic practices of contemporary Cambodia and its diasporas,2 find that both the objects

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they study and their own scholarship remain illegible to the broader discipline. As Kajri Jain notes in the 2020 Decolonizing Art History questionnaire: To some [my scholarship] is unrecognizable as art history, because it entails thinking about the power, value, and affects of non-canonical images, in ways that both include and complicate the frame of ‘art’ but also go beyond the hegemonic frame of the ‘visual’ in ‘visual culture’. In other words it tries to reckon with both the undeniable inadequacy and the ongoing force of the categories we have received from colonialism to understand objects-images-events-practices.3 These scholars, and others, are working to rethink the discipline in ways that might be characterized as decolonizing, each of them also pursuing cognate arenas of destabilizing the Eurocentrism and asymmetrical power relations that undergird the study of the history of art: bringing gender, sexuality, religious faith, domestic practice, and deeply felt and shared trauma into the art historical conversation. Another, very much related, arena that I see as a site for decolonizing practices of thought comes from artists’ practices. Boreth Ly’s mode of entry into the ongoing trauma of the Cambodian genocide starts with artistic practice as a way to understand the affective and psychological component of Cambodian conceptual frameworks for trauma such as baksbat, or “broken courage.” Ly’s reading of Amy Lee Sanford’s Full Circle performance (2012)—in which the artist pieces back together broken pots made from clay from her father’s village in Cambodia—finds in Sanford’s practice an art historical language that enables discussion of the bodily and psychic broken-ness Ly’s book carefully unfolds. Following the path Ly and others have marked out, I center my engagement with the decolonial on Rina Banerjee’s work, as it is deeply embedded in a critique of historical colonialism and its persistent contemporaneity.4 And, in working through that interconnection, her ­sculpture–installations5 enable me, as an art historian, to see what a decolonial or decolonizing practice might look like. Banerjee signals her decolonizing maneuvers through a set of terms found in her titles, interviews, and reflections on her work, terms that I am using here as touchstones for unpacking the criticality of her relation to diaspora, history, and violence. And in her work we learn, intimately, that the decolonial cannot proceed except through the colonial. Banerjee builds new environments from objects that partake in a capitalist, colonialist economy and ecology. She re-constructs them, relabels them, gives us new language to think through them, and as such, her installations, sculptures, and material collages produce decolonial ecologies of their own.

DE1: Contagion (Diagnosis) Banerjee’s sculpture–installations draw from the imagery of the biological specimen, creating forms that evoke plant, insect, and animal but coalesce into a sense of the alien, coming together in otherworldly garden settings that threaten to overtake both galleries and the bodies that move through them. An early, groundbreaking solo show was entitled Antenna, as the works have antennae—a reference to insect anatomy, imaginary alien lifeforms, and to communication devices. Antennae tie the world together and also mark the other as

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other—tentacled humanoids are just different enough to cause repulsion and fear. Banerjee connects these threads with the iconography of Indian deities: Many of the figures/bodies are contorted or distorted appear insect-like because they have multiple appendages. I find most people respond to the representations of Indian deities as bizarre because of their multiple appendages. So I was really thinking of how my response to seeing Indian deities as an American growing up here was that of, “Oh, yes they’re so insect-like,” you know? But aren’t all third world people insect like?6 Banerjee drops the mic, brings the colonizing presumption to the fore, and forces her audience to reckon with that reality in her work. Insect-like, spreading, hidden beneath the seemingly staid structures of society—an infestation rather than an invasion, something slower, more insidious, more difficult to identify and control. Not the barbarians at the gate—the barbarian is already here, was always here, taking the form of the alien, insectlike, contagious, viral other. At the Whitney Biennial in 2000, Banerjee exhibited Infectious Migrations, sharing the space with Sarah Sze, Paul Pfeiffer, and Shirin Neshat.7 Infectious Migrations gathered together myriad found materials that amass atop a mylar architectural diagram she found on the street that maps the air ducts and electrical passages of a building at Columbia’s School of Public Health. Plastic tubing drips from the wall across a 30-foot span, coalescing in a piece of mylar that oozes onto the floor in front of a form that evokes both animal and plant life. Banerjee here turns her attention to the public health crisis in India and Africa at the turn of the millennium when the AIDS epidemic raged largely unchecked in the so-called Third World. Tentacles reach out from the epicenter of the piece, and one breathes the dust of kumkum and incense, evoking the bodily and global interconnections that fed and continue to feed the AIDS health crisis, linking us together despite our refusal to acknowledge our interrelations. Over the course of the 2000s, Banerjee starts incorporating larger objects, purchased online or at shops near her studio in Brooklyn—antique chairs, plastic dolls, elements of taxidermy such as horns and skulls, replicas of animal heads, ebony sculptures of rhinoceroses, dismantled pieces of chandeliers, lampshades, ostrich feather dusters. Her titles expand, matching the increasing complexity and layering of her sculptures themselves. The words operate like the materials she gathers into her sculptural installations: each phrase evokes a longer history of colonial exploration, of gendered hierarchies, of creole sensibilities, of the redeployment of English in its local vernacular forms around the world: Make me a summary of the world! She was his guide and had traveled on camel, rhino, elephant and kangaroo, dedicated to dried plants, glass houses—for medical study, vegetable sexuality, self-pollination, fertilization her reach pierced the woods country by country. (See Figure 35.1) For Banerjee, these titles enable her to shape the relationship with the visitor and expand the work to include her thoughts as she was making it: what she was reading perhaps, other

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Figure 35.1  Rina Banerjee, Make me a summary of the world! She was his guide and had traveled on camel, rhino, elephant and kangaroo, dedicated to dried plants, glass houses—for medical study, vegetable sexuality, self-pollination, fertilization her reach pierced the woods country by country, 2006, wood rhino, Chinese umbrellas, sea sponges, linen, beads, pewter soldiers, grape vines, glass chandelier drops, acrylic horns, wire, nylon and bead flowers, 7 × 4 ft. Courtesy Studio Banerjee, NYC.

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artists’ work, histories she’s engaging with. Rather than leave textual interpretation to the art historian or the critic, Banerjee offers us her own text and voice—she also talks about how she is attentive to “accent” in these titles—at a site where one cannot ignore it or look past it, refusing the silencing of the artist and the hegemony of others’ texts.8 For me, as a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books published about thencolonized India, Banerjee’s poetic captions powerfully evoke their long titles and descriptive tables of contents. These books actively participated in the larger project of empire and colonization, providing details of local cultures, geography, trade routes, monuments, and “tribes” in order to map and typologize—control—the soon-to-be or already colonized landscape. Like the meandering titles for these texts, Banerjee’s titles seem a bit “antiquated” or distant from contemporary speech. The texts thus, for me, decolonize through a colonial evocation: they interrupt our expected norms by demanding that we hear the voice of the artist and the voice of the work rather than leave them mute. And they do so through a textual form that has the flavor of old, dusty colonial-era books. They evoke the juxtapositions found in travel and scientific compendia, attempts to organize the unorganizable, to name and categorize and tether the world’s living and inert things. These nineteenth-century works are also often illustrated, with landscapes, images of local people, and flora and fauna, and Banerjee’s work rhymes especially well with some of these images, especially the birds nesting amid branches, flowers, fruits, and other objects as found in Audubon publications.9 Banerjee’s work brings these colonial attempts to know the other into focus—through nineteenth-century scientific phrenology, through collecting specimens in jars and pressing them in books, through compiling illustrations of birds and other creatures, through preserving body parts—human, animal, reptile—for display and contemplation, through the power of naming both through Linnaean taxonomies and through equally poetic local evocations of myth and narrative. In Make me a summary of the world!…, Banerjee makes manifest the sense of spreading and “reach” in the title. The sculpture, usually displayed on a short, small platform, projects multiple elements from a metal vertical axis—acrylic horns, a black gourd, a cowriecovered sinuous horn ending in a doll head with red hair dramatically punctuating its top, all of which echoes the text of the title. The Chinese umbrellas, long needle-like forms, seaweed-like grasses, dried grape vine branches, and little toy soldiers add both to this outward gesture and to the sense that the sculpture is teeming with life, ready to jump off and infect—perhaps even colonize—those who walk past. The rhino of the title appears, miniaturized, in the wooden rhino carving nested at the center of the maelstrom. And the “vegetable sexuality” manifests throughout, in the provocative shape of the gourd, the sensuality of the mounds of sea sponges, the vigorous connection of doll head and horn, and the small vaginal shapes of the cowrie. The title points to a “she” who guided him, who “pierced the woods” evoking eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel narratives and colonial projects of exploration and expansion. It reminds readers of the many contexts in which women, often elder women, serve as the source for medicinal and botanical knowledge, “piercing” the woods with their knowledge of plant life. The sculpture, like all of her work, is the result of a process of seeking, browsing, discovering, gathering, collecting, selecting, and then reconstructing. These actions also might describe a colonial project of knowledge production: seeking out “untapped” resources, “discovering” new lands, people, species, collecting samples, drawings, or photographs for transport across the world, ordering that collection in an archive or for a museum, and reconstructing these things into what appears (but never quite is) a coherent 463

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ordering system. Banerjee replays these colonial actions but her seeking and discovery takes place not in distant lands—she need not travel on camel, rhino, elephant, and kangaroo—­instead, the world comes to her through the magic of the internet and her own location at the center of a panoply of immigrant communities and the centrifugal force drawing global trade to her doorstep in Brooklyn. “Globalization means that we no longer need to go on ‘expeditions’ the way Victorian explorers did. The East has arrived.”10 Banerjee critically undermines the drive to control and arrange found in colonial enterprises of discovery. Instead, she shows us the flow of goods and people in our present moment—these objects, both made and “natural” are each a small node in the churn of goods around the world, a churn whose circulation traces its genealogy to earlier colonial economic relations. And rather than present them as controlled, captured, nailed down, or put into typologized boxes, Banerjee runs straight at that churn, giving us an overflowing panoply of objects and textures arranged purposively but not rigidly into what we can recognize as a sculpture, perched on its small platform, engaging the space around it. That it seems to have the potential to keep growing out of its forms is only appropriate and accurate to the flows Banerjee is tapping in her work. It is thus a “summary of the world” in its animal, vegetal, sexual, medical, self-pollinating, fertilizing power, one that celebrates the potential for the small object, the bit of material, to overwhelm, transport, fertilize and perhaps even infect the viewer.

DE2: Electricity (Resistance) Banerjee’s commitment to flow and movement is underscored by an often overlooked element in her sculpture–installations: electricity. The small circuits of energy that illuminate inside the bulb are echoed by the use of garden hoses, spindly electrical wires, rubber tubing, and riverine imagery to amplify the idea of flow throughout. In 2006, in an abandoned primary school in Japan, Banerjee used a combination of light and other forms of conduit to create the second iteration of her Taj Mahal installations.11 Made of mosquito net and bamboo poles, Lure of Places draws on materials from the school (see Figure 35.2). Garden hoses cascade down from inverted school chairs, these long dangling tubes framing an illuminated cluster of light bulbs and classroom laboratory glassware that hangs all the way to the floor. In the dome above, classroom globes float like balloons. The work uses materials that restrict flows, like the mosquito netting, a substance that in this green form also evokes the netting used for tea ceremony rooms in mid-twentieth century Japan.12 And the structure’s hollow bamboo poles extend upward, slightly askew, evoking their segmented continual growth when alive, drawing our eye into the air and through the ceiling. In both we have a sense of the temporal flow—of history, of growth—embedded in the materials. And, like liquids, air, and electricity which cannot be made static and anchored, the whole assemblage floats, its tentacle legs not quite touching the ground, hovering in between, poised to drift, slink, or scuttle off somewhere else. In combination with the image of the floating Taj Mahal, itself a figure of fantasy and dreams, the work re-animates an empty school, bringing the thoughts and dreams of the children who studied there into vibrating focus.13 In addition to the connections to landscape, insects, nostalgia, education, and history Banerjee invests in this work, its location in Japan conjures an additional 1950s reference. In the second exhibition of the Gutai Group in 1956, artist Atsuko Tanaka wore her now-canonical work of bulbs and illumination, Electric Dress. Inspired by the neon 464

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Figure 35.2  Rina Banerjee, Lure of Places, 2006, linen mosquito nets, ceramic horns, school chairs, garden hoses, laboratory glassware, globes, bamboo, wire, lights, 118 × 118 × 157.5 in, installed at the Third Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, Tokomachi City, Japan. Photo T. Kobayashi. Courtesy Studio Banerjee, NYC.

lights on an advertisement at the Osaka train station, Tanaka’s dress commented on the spread of technology and spectacle in the rebuilding economy of Japan after World War II, and also reflected on the destruction such glorified technology could wreak. As Tanaka remembers it: When it was finished, I was uncomfortable about the electrical connections. Since somebody had to wear it, I covered myself with vinyl and put the electric dress on. The moment Mr. Sannomiya said, “I am turning the electricity on,” I had the fleeting thought: Is this how a death-row inmate would feel?14 This subtle, pulsating danger that electricity and lightbulbs carry also extends to Banerjee’s use of them in Lure of Places and elsewhere. Thus, in moving through the firefly-lantern space of the green Taj form, one might pick up the concerns that Tanaka lays out: are we facing a beautiful confection of the Taj Mahal, reimagined with children’s chairs, globes, and playful lights? Or is the assemblage of schooling, geography, history, pest control, chemistry sets, and electricity floating in spindly bamboo meant to remind us of the way technology, knowledge, and history have the potential to cascade dangerously down on our heads? Banerjee’s flows of science, schoolroom memories, summer nights, crawling insects and fireflies work in tension with the sense of decay and nostalgia of the empty school, its aging material form, and the delicate balance between the immersive magic of summer and the destructive flows of technology, time, and the wild. In reading the work through 465

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Tanaka, her 1950s warning to those living in a post-atomic age is refocused anew to alert us to early twenty-first-century threats to the natural and historical ecologies Banerjee unfurls. The art world and indeed the entire world are, as Banerjee says, filled with “charges and resistances”: flow in her work rarely goes unimpeded, and often the restrictions on flow send the work in new directions, illustrating what happens to flows—migrations, movements, transformations—through, with, and against the material.15 Banerjee’s lit and unlit bulbs link us to that undertow of resistance in her work. Her deployment of these historical, colonial flows throughout her oeuvre nods to the spread of technologies, electricity, viruses, humans, and plants across the world, continuing from the nineteenth century to today, through commerce, collecting, and imperial exploration and exploitation. Goods, materials, ideas, charges, resistances—these jostle in all of her installations, reminding us of the intimate connection our current world flows have to colonial asymmetries of power, while also challenging us to rethink that colonial history and its continued presence.

DE3: Barbarian (Charging) Colonial knowledge regimes relied on a fundamental assertion of difference—the barbarian versus the civilized, the alien versus the known. Recall Banerjee’s statement above about Indian multi-armed gods, the alien, and the insect. Banerjee’s juxtapositions of made and organic material, selecting and arranging from the flows of goods, animal parts, and other items to refigure our relation to contemporary global capitalist movements of people, things, and ideas opens up new ways of thinking about contemporary global relations. Colonization is present, of the now—we live in a colonized world—and yet it is also of the past, of history: decolonization is an on-going, active process, one that must be tended to carefully and continuously. Thus, rather than seek an impossible erasure of colonialism and its legacies, Banerjee’s work critically re-engages these flows for the present moment. Banerjee shows us the colonial in the present and the “other” in the “self” or the barbarian in the civilized, making visible the flows that undermine the separateness of these paired antagonists. “Flow” is not something natural or benign; it brings with it the barbaric and the contagious, the promise and threat of transformation, and is carried forward with the power of centuries of colonialism. In a powerful talk given in 2007, Philippine art historian Marian Pastor Roces claims the barbarian as a crucial positionality for Asian artists and curators, one that is more than embedded within the civilized: “The barbarian, civilization’s foil, is simultaneously, civilization’s pure visage; civilization’s cruel, hideous energy; and civilization’s nexus of desire, contempt, and fear.”16 The civilizing mission of British colonialism in India, and of assimilatory measures demanded of immigrants in the US and elsewhere—these missions reveal themselves to be barbaric in the violence and erasure they have effected on individuals, cultures, and histories. Pastor Roces explodes the ideal of the civilized by revealing this barbarism located not just at its core but permeating civilization’s being: “In that context, the barbaric course can only be a kind of plague. The dynamics: seepage, infection, contagion, infiltration, encysting, dyeing, secretion. Old-as-the-hills barbarians, for viruses, in fact, are antediluvian creatures.”17 Pastor Roces places contagion and infection at the center of our current world—an invasion that is diffuse, difficult to control, permeating the fabric of the body and the body politic, exploding norms of time and space, and seeping in to challenge the primacy of c­ olonial

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narratives and colonial legacies. She enables us to see the thorough imbrication and threat of the barbaric as it shaped colonial discourse and as it continues to shape the global conversation. That she directly links this to a viral metaphor, one that spreads biologically and technologically through and is indeed directly created and fed by the organic and inorganic systems of contemporary/late capitalism, just as it infected and revealed as impossible the completion of the colonial civilizing project, makes her barbarian all the more pressing for the contemporary moment. We see the barbarian in the civilized in Banerjee’s earliest works—she plays on this in Infectious Migrations, using the mylar plan of the air and electricity ducts in a public health facility to undergird the transmission of viral contagions—at that time the AIDS pandemic, later and now other kinds of viruses and crises fomented by and encouraged to spread by the very civilization that makes a show of trying to stop them. And we see that civilized barbarian again in the schoolroom nostalgia and electrified threat of Lure of Places. Throughout her oeuvre, Banerjee decolonizes by showing us colonizing logics as they continue to shape our economic, political, and cultural world. Her works circulate in schools, via triennialdriven circuits of art world capital, are installed in and disrupt European portrait galleries, and remind us of the ways in which the presence of both an ebony rhino and Banerjee’s work in that gallery, museum, or catalog are underwritten by these continued logics. Through interruption and disruption—electrical resistance—Banerjee outlines these legacies and challenges us to deconstruct them, cowrie shell by cowrie shell, spent bulb by spent bulb. Banerjee’s works are, to take Banerjee’s word in its multifaceted richness, “charged.” Charged in that the art vibrates and hums with the violent current of colonialism that continues to drive the contemporary world. Charged in that the art charges toward us—it lures us in, through a sequence of slowly unfolding portraits and narratives or through delight found in the variety of materials, and then hits us hard with the heartrending ruptures and violences these objects and images unfurl. Charged in that by grappling with the art we receive a charge, it reminds us of our responsibility to that past, and demands that we work actively to undo erasures in our collective memories, makes us see the presentness of colonialism and urges us to work to halt what Patrick Flores has called its “continuum of violence.” A final, important note. Banerjee makes this—and other—interventions with care, love, and attention. Banerjee gives us contagion, invasive species, barbarians, and aliens through a productive playfulness. She maintains a hope, not that we can erase the colonial legacy, but that we can honor the lost people and potential by shifting the flow, directing the charge, embracing the barbaric, and respecting the contagion.

Author’s Note My thanks to all three editors of the volume for the invitation to contribute to this conversation, to the anonymous reviewer for provocative and incredibly helpful interventions, and of course to Rina Banerjee for her generosity and trust in me. Thanks also to my research assistant, Alyssa Lee, who offered invaluable insights for this project as she worked through interview transcripts and artists’ talks. My gratitude to my colleague Deborah Hutton, who read an early draft, and to the faculty and students at Nanjing Technical University, who heard an early version of this paper. Finally, I dedicate this to the Hopkins undergraduates in my Fall 2019 Asia America course whose energy and generosity continue to inspire me.

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Notes 1 Patrick Flores, “When Commitments Confuse: Writing and Curating (Around) the Nature of Art History,” on-line lecture and discussion, May 8, 2020, South Asia Art Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcDKDRUuqNY 2 Here I refer, in turn, to Pika Ghosh’s Making Kantha, Making Home: Women at Work in ­Colonial Bengal (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020); Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); and Boreth Ly, Traces of Trauma: Cambodian Visual Culture and National Identity in the Aftermath of Genocide (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2020). 3 Kajri Jain, in Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price, eds., “Decolonizing Art History,” Art History 43, no. 1 (February 2020): 29. 4 Flores points to several transnational artists in his argument, including Alfonso Ossorio (1916–90) and Carlos Villa (1936–2013). 5 Banerjee most often uses “sculpture” when talking about each work; she also acknowledges the potential in the term “installation” which many commentators and students use. Banerjee sees that “sculpture” might sometimes be more isolated/isolating than “installation,” noting that she wants to enable people to have more freedom to make discoveries about the work, and installation serves that purpose nicely. I would argue that there is also something quite sculptural about her work. Even if it isn’t a solid object, often you walk around it, or it hangs from the wall as an identifiable unit. Hence my “sculpture–installation” moniker. 6 Barbara Hunt, Amy Sadao, and Rina Banerjee, “A Dialogue: An Interview with Rina Banerjee,” in Rina Banerjee: Antenna (New York: Bose Pacia Modern, 2000). 7 Maxwell I. Anderson, et al. Whitney Biennial: 2000 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2000); Carol Vogel, “Choosing a Palette of Biennial Artists: Surprises in the Whitney’s Selections,” New York Times (8 December 1999), E1, E5. 8 The artist discusses her titles in an interview by Dipti Mathur, Sugata Ray, and Atreyee Gupta, 5 September 2019, Institute for South Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley, Hosfelt ­Gallery, https://youtu.be/xWJk7FQuIoI, accessed 19 February 2021. 9 Jennifer Roberts discusses these works and their mobility in her Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 10 As quoted on the gallery label for the object in the “Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World” exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, October 27, 2018– March 31, 2019. 11 The occasion was the Third Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, 23 July to 10 September 2006, held in Tokamachi City and Tsunan Town, Niigata Prefecture, Japan. The school was the Sanada Primary School in Hachi village. See Jodi Throckmorton, et al., Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2018), 134. 12 Author conversation with the artist, 19 January 2021. 13 Ibid. 14 Ming Tiampo, “Electrifying Painting,” in Atsuko Tanaka, Ming Tiampo and Mizuho Kato, eds., Electrifying Art: Atsuko Tanaka, 1954–1968 (Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2004), 73 [62–77], quoting Tanaka from a 1993 statement, “When I Make My Work,” republished in Electrifying Art, 105. 15 Rina Banerjee, as quoted in Rachel Kent, “Rina Banerjee: Global Traveler,” in Jodi Throckmorton, et al., eds., Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2018), 99. Quotation from unpublished interview with Kent in 2017. 16 Marian Pastor Roces, “Curating Barbarians: Descriptions of a Visual Practice,” in Parul Dave Mukherji et al., eds., InFlux: Contemporary Art in Asia (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2013), 58. 17 Ibid., 60–61.

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Selected Bibliography Anderson, Maxwell I., et al. Whitney Biennial: 2000. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2000. Banerjee, Rina. Interview by Dipti Mathur, Sugata Ray, and Atreyee Gupta. Institute for South Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley, Hosfelt Gallery (5 September 2019), https://youtu.be/ xWJk7FQuIoI, accessed 19 February 2021. Flores, Patrick. “When Commitments Confuse: Writing and Curating (Around) the Nature of Art History.” On-line lecture and discussion, May 8, 2020, South Asia Art Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcDKDRUuqNY Ghosh, Pika. Making Kantha, Making Home: Women at Work in Colonial Bengal. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. Grant, Catherine, and Dorothy Price, eds. “Decolonizing Art History.” Art History 43.1 (February 2020), 8–66. Jain, Kajri. Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Ly, Boreth. Traces of Trauma: Cambodian Visual Culture and National Identity in the Aftermath of Genocide. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2020. Pastor Roces, Marian. “Curating Barbarians: Descriptions of a Visual Practice.” In Parul Dave Mukherji et al., eds. InFlux: Contemporary Art in Asia, pp. 57–68. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2013. Tanaka, Atsuko, Ming Tiampo, and Mizuho Kato. Electrifying Art: Atsuko Tanaka, 1954–1968. Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2004. Throckmorton, Jodi, et al. Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2018. Vettel-Becker, Patricia. “Sacagawea and Son: The Visual Construction of America’s Maternal Feminine.” American Studies 50, 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2009), 27–50. Vogel, Carol. “Choosing a Palette of Biennial Artists: Surprises in the Whitney’s Selections.” New York Times (8 December 1999), E1, E5.

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36 THE TEACHING IS IN THE MAKING A Relational and Embodied Experience of Anishinaabe Photographs Celeste Pedri-Spade Anishinabekwewag are makers! We make things for our people … our families … food, clothing, blankets, ceremonial clothing, slippers, baskets, etc. It is what we do. It is who we are.1 (Marcia Pedri, personal communication with author, September 2012)

Introduction I open this chapter with a teaching that my mother once shared with me. It continues to ground and guide my thoughts and practice as an Anishinabekwe artist and visual anthropologist primarily interested in the role of Indigenous visual/material culture in decolonial praxis. Indeed, like my mother I am a ‘maker.’ Being a maker is both a gift/talent and responsibility that necessitates ongoing relationships with self, kin, community, and land. It requires the maker to be ever aware of the fact that when they bring something into this world, they are part of a process that both depends on and engenders a host of relations between people, ideas, emotions, history, spirit, and both personal and collective knowledges. My mother’s teaching was shared with me as I was bringing together a body of visual/ material work that explored what kinds of knowledges of the past might be made possible if I were to take up historical Anishinabe family photographs as district material things that could be used as materials to, essentially, make different kinds of things. This teaching has also carried me forward in my recent work that explores the lives and experiences of ­Anishinabe women through the production of textile art. In this chapter, I will revisit some of the visual culture that I produced with Anishinabe photographs in order to illustrate how taking a relational and embodied approach to Anishinabe photographs is imperative to understanding its significance within our families and communities. Moreover, I will show how this approach is imperative for understanding the role that Anishinabe photographs will continue to play in decolonial praxis.

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My Journey with Anishinabe Photographs For the past decade I have been journeying with a collection of historical family photographs of Anishinabeg taken from around 1915 to 1960. The photographs are of my relatives and other Anishinabe families with present and past ties to Anishinabe territory situated in what is now known as Northwestern Ontario. Drawing on Anishinabe ways of knowing, which privilege practices/protocols of respect, collaboration, and relational accountability, over the years, I have worked with several community members to gather and experience photographs in creative and innovative ways that permit me to honor the people with whom I work and my roles/responsibilities as an Anishinabe artist. This journey has confirmed what many Indigenous scholars have articulated before, that is, as Indigenous Peoples Anishinabeg are no strangers to photography. Our photographs of our family members together engaged in our way of life within our homelands continue to be a powerful testament to our legacy of combatting settler colonialism as they often counter colonial narratives that position our people as absent from the lands/waters through strategic omissions/erasures in colonial archives. As intentional photographic acts, they show us what our family members who came before us struggled to maintain so that we may remember what it means to be Anishinabe. I have written about the role and value of bringing together these photographs with descendants of those originally pictured in how this process helps restore and strengthen ­relationships among people and places.2 Photographs as a distinct form of Anishinabe visual culture help convey and configure a host of relations across time and space, which make them valuable aids in the regenerative efforts of Anishinabe communities aimed at addressing intergenerational colonial trauma. Actually, Anishinabe photographs operate in the telling of history and in the process of reclaiming the stories of the ancestors, they often compel people to act.3 They often do so as they get caught up in the multiple lives of those they touch. At the same time, as distinct material objects resulting from different kinds of relationships between human and non-human actors, we are reminded that they exist because of series of acts that took place at a given point in time. Indeed, the relational, process-oriented nature of photographs is located in the Anishinaabemowin word for photograph. In Anishinabemowin, the root of the word for photograph (mazinaakizon) is “mazinaa,” which, as Louise Erdrich states, “is the root for dozens of words all concerned with made images and with the substances [emphasis added] upon which the images are put, paper, screens.”4 The etymology of mazinaakizon stresses the importance of conceptualizing Anishinabe photographs not simply as finished objects/entities that mean something but as active things that embody and engender different kinds of meanings made possible as they come into being and circulate in the world.

Re-Making Anishinabe Photographs As an Anishinabe maker, my engagement with Anishinabe photographs has led to recreating old family photographs with present-day descendants of those pictured back within our homelands 50–100 years ago. The idea to recreate images of our ancestors came from a conversation I had with a community member several years ago when I was planning an earlier project and searching for ways to experience our family photographs in a way that reflected my individual creativity and interest in the camera. During this planning stage, I looked to the work of other Indigenous photographers engaged in work with historical photographic

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archives of Indigenous peoples. What I found was that much of the work which drew on archival images of Indigenous peoples used photographs created by ­non-Indigenous photographs and that this work aimed to challenge and subvert colonial narratives and stereotypes. As an Anishinabekwe artist, I was particularly drawn to the work of other female Indigenous artists creating art that incorporated their own family photographs. I found that this work offered valuable insight into Indigenous identities, gender issues, and the importance of relationships within Indigenous families.5 I wanted to explore the role of the camera in regenerating relationships (to the past, to one another in the present, to our ancestors, etc.), which were integral to our survivance as Anishinabeg. I was inspired by visual anthropologist and artist Trudi Smith’s use of repeat photography as an embodied experience that involves an artistic and ethnographicinformed retake of a photograph in order to “make the past present and to present the past.”6 Smith employs repeat photography as an embodied ethnographic act that relies upon identifying the location of the historical photograph and retaking the image from the same vantage point. In doing so, she explores the value of archival photographs in exploring experiences of space and place across time. Drawing from her work, I met with several individuals to select an image of their ancestor(s) that we could retake. Photographs were selected collaboratively with participants; however, I tried to ensure that my work reflected our women, men, children, and kitchianishinabekwewag (female Elders). My initial intent was to scout out the exact location where each historical photograph was taken and retake it; however, early on in the process, I realized that it was very difficult to pinpoint locations, given that the photographs were portraitures and not landscape ­images. Also, one of the kitchianishinabekwewag involved in the process didn’t seem to understand the need to locate the exact same location given that we knew our ancestors walked all over our territory and indeed their presence could still be seen and felt, s­ pecifically through sharing stories, fasting and other ceremonies. I saw this view as indicative of an Indigenous understanding of place as an expansive, fluid concept based on the interconnectivity of human and natural environments whereby notions of place emerge through a whole host of relationship-building activities and practices concerned with k ­ inship, belongingness, identity, and community well-being.7 Thus, we began the process of going out to locations where we knew our ancestors talked about or where the people who participated in the repeat photographs felt connected to as Anishinabeg. During these field trips, we talked about what we knew about the people in the photograph, the places they used to visit, what they liked to do, and who their friends and family were. We also talked about what we didn’t know, including their residential schools, child welfare, and interference by private and government organizations. Picking on what they wanted to wear in the photograph and how they should pose, some individuals decided to try to dress and pose in a similar manner to their ancestor, while others honored their relatives by wearing their regalia. While every person’s experience and story were unique to them, what connected the narratives of all our images was our belief in and admiration for the struggle of our ­ancestors—what they had to endure to remain connected to their children, their spirituality, their friends, and their lands. As people shared their perspectives, it became quite clear that the same tenacity and spirit was still present in each and every one of us as the descendants of the people originally pictured. As the photographer, I felt a tremendous sense of honor and responsibility. After all, I was documenting Anishinabeg that many people in society believe no longer existed, people I knew had to fight to maintain their Indigenous presence in different Western institutions. 472

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I was documenting survivors of intergenerational colonial trauma; people who were so full of hope, love, and strength, despite decades of struggle. It became imperative for me to find a way to privilege them—their presence as living, breathing Indigenous People belonging in a contemporary world. Technically, for each portrait, I used a tilt shift to bring an almost three-dimensional quality to the image, to create movement and energy. I employed this aesthetic to emphasize that, yes, there is something never settled about Indigenous existence—we are always struggling to maintain our presence, our identity, our cultural practices, our rights to our lands—but also to emphasize that through this struggle, Anishinabeg carry themselves with a grace, fortitude, and dignity. Using a tilt-shift is a way of playing around with the planes of focus in a way that defies physics. I saw my friends and family members as individuals who continuously strove to defy and resist colonialism (Figure 36.1). Similar to Smith’s work, this project aimed at turning the archive from a site of excavation to a site of construction and creativity remembering; as Morten Sondergaard states, that “archives will always play a large part in construction that is human being.”8 Yet, as Richard Vokes states, power is central to photographs involving Indigenous people because photography came into Indigenous societies as a tool used by the European colonizer to exploit, dominate, and colonize Indigenous Peoples.9 As we repeated the photographs of our ancestors, transforming the archive to a site of construction and creativity, this process became a powerful tool to counter colonialism and re-assert Anishinabeg sovereignty, remaking each photograph as intentional acts of Anishinabeg going back out onto their traditional lands, now “owned” by a settler colonial governments, thereby re-inscribing Anishinabeg presence in contested lands. In Indigenous photographer and academic Kathleen J. Martin words, “Within the historical images there resides the opportunity to examine the footprint of Native Peoples upon the land, and simultaneously to re-inhabit and re-claim these Native places in the active interpreted present.”10 As we came together, we looked to the photographs searching not only for stories about their lives but evidence of our best selves within these stories, because the stories emanating from the images were of pride and determination. In a way, our ancestors are looking back at us, checking up on us as any good teacher or caretaker would. Thus, the two images together speak to the existence of the ongoing fight for self-determination and a deep bond with our ancestors that we strive to maintain.11 It is a bond I believe they feel as well. As Anishinabeg we often connect over a shared history of colonial violence, yet through the production of this artwork, we connected over a shared history of successfully surviving this violence. It is an important aspect of our healing journey—to recognize and reaffirm our history of countering decades of colonialism, which can get overshadowed by past and present forms of colonial violence we encounter every day. Moreover, in recreating the photograph, we are presenting a version of ourselves back to our ancestors as a mark of ­gratitude—as a thank you and an acknowledgement of our responsibility to them. Indigenous scholar Vine Deloria Jr. reminds us that for Indigenous people “place” is best understood as the relationship of things (land, people, other-than human, spirit) to each other.12 Furthermore, Damien Lee reminds us that for Anishinabeg, relationships are responsibility and reciprocity; therefore, for Anishinabeg place is the reciprocal relationship we find ourselves within our Anishinabe territory and all the beings and things within them.13 Therefore, this experience of remaking photographs of our ancestors enfolded ongoing reciprocal relationships to place that were not about experiencing the land in the same way as our ancestors did, but were about establishing and working on our own relationships in 473

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Figure 36.1  Celeste Pedri-Spade, untitled, 2014. Image description: Portrait of Anishinaabekwe Cher Chapman on Fort William First Nation territory.

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a respectful, non-invasive way. Following the teachings of our ancestors, we left each place in the same way we found it, instead inscribing our presence through our relationships and the shutter click.

A Journey of Making with/through Anishinabe Photographs Anthropologist Paul Stoller urges researchers to address the texture of social life—to think about history as more than text on a page or stories told about the past.14 In his work involving the Songhay people in West Africa, Stoller demonstrates how history is a set of living forces that sensuously brings the past into the flow of life. He encourages researchers to address the “tactile dimension of history … that which people are able to hear, smell, and touch the past.”15 As an Anishinabekwe artist/researcher, I have often longed for this tactile dimension of history, inspired by the words of my kitchianishinabeg that would often discuss how, we wear our teachings, that we live our knowledge. I have written elsewhere about the performative, embodied, and creative dimensions of Anishinabe knowledge— how Anishinabeg produce and make use of a range of material artworks—drums, songs, paintings, photographs—in transmitting knowledge related to all aspects of life from one generation to the next and how these ways of knowing are ways of being and ways of practicing our spirituality.16 Racette states an artistic practice of resistance is one that simultaneously focuses outward and inward, giving strength to those engaged in struggle.17 As part of my journey inward, I selected several photographs of my own ancestors to materialize into regalia and cultural items that I in turn could give back to my own family members. Prior to this endeavor, I received a dream that I was making regalia out of photographs of my ancestors, and after consultation with my mother and other family members, I accepted the responsibility to carry out this vision. There are a few points about the significance of such an undertaking that I must attend to from my position as an Anishinabekwe and as a visual anthropologist. My first point relates to the value of dreams or dreaming to Anishinabe knowledge and research. Within Anishinabe worldview, dreams are valuable tools. As Dawn Marsden illustrates, dreams are especially helpful in guiding a person’s actions towards achieving knowledge goals or making sense of the world.18 My second point relates to my identity and role as a practicing visual anthropologist with a particular interest in, and commitment to, linking processes and practices of remembrance, family stories, photography, materiality, and creativity. As an Anishinabekwe artist and researcher I find myself “at home” exploring those fluid, messy, and critical spaces where I can not only write about history but think, smell, and touch it. Therefore, I locate myself within what Stoller describes as the multi-sensorial spaces where stories of the past are told and retold, experienced and understood through sound, movement, scent, and touch.19 Third, in making regalia based on these photographs, I immediately locate photographs not simply as finished items that can be read but as material items that can be worked with. Thus, this endeavor corresponds with anthropological/artistic focus on processes of making things and what happens to photographs as they become caught up in the life histories and social interactions of the people who experience them.20 Christopher Wright states that an awareness of photography as material culture calls for a different and more nuanced methodological approach in anthropological research.21 Working from an Anishinabekwe standpoint, this approach must be grounded in the Anishinabeg philosophy of Nebwakawin, which informs an Anishinabeg knowledge system. 475

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Nebwakawin is the act of looking backwards, while at the same time bringing forward the knowledge and experiences that our Anishinabeg ancestors have always carried. ­Nebwakawin as thinking back, bringing forward and stitching it all together, is similar to Coleman’s image work that revolves around transforming photographs through creative processes whereby the making of something new is not disconnected from the past, o ­ ld— that by materializing the affectivity of a photograph into something new, one might learn from and engage with the past in new ways.22 Connected to Coleman’s work, specifically my interest in the affectivity of my ­photographs—there ability to move me and generate memories and knowledge of that past that often remain hidden by purely textual research. I turned to Elizabeth Edward’s work on the material practices of photography, specifically her work on photographic affects and the specific ways that photographs are put to work.23 Edwards outlines two interconnected embodied and sensory encounters significant to my methodology. The first she terms placing, which is defined as “a sense of appropriateness of particular material forms to particular sets of social expectations and desire within space and time.”24 Placing is linked to the notion of appropriateness or the culturally determined factors that allow photographs as material objects to be worked with or performed in certain ways. As an Anishinabekwe, the notion of placing is linked to my responsibility to acknowledge and carry out the work I received through my dream through consultation with my family to ensure it was done in a good way. Indeed, my first step was accepting and committing to working with my family photographs to produce the regalia items. This process was done together with my mother and grandmother and was commenced through putting out a tobacco offering in order to start the process in a respectful way. Following this, I went back to my collection of photographs and selected seven images. Selection was based on both preexisting relationship with the images—I had already formed a strong attachment to some of the photographs—and my own intuition as an Anishinabekwe—some images simply stood out to me with a desire to be part of this work. Instead of working on multiple items at the same time, I was instructed by my Elder to devote my time to each photograph independently. I spent time not analyzing or reading the image, but just simply sat with the image. Instead of approaching each image with a question of, “what can I do with you?” or “what do I know or remember about you?” I approached each image with, “what do you want of me?” In other words, I privileged a ­non-representational approach that moved away from questions about what images ­represent towards questions that ask what images might do and embody.25 The shift towards this approach was also informed by teachings I had received on how to interpret Anishinabeg things within my Anishinabeg learning circle. Mainly, that instead of asking what things represent or mean, we, as Anishinabe people should be asking what meaning do these things bring us or lead us toward.26 My methodological approach was also informed by my own identity as an Anishinabekwe maker and a personal responsibility to create regalia and other items that are linked to our ongoing commitment to honor our relationships with each other, our ancestors and the spirit world. The second encounter Edwards outlines in her work on photographs and material affects is remediation or replacing, which considers the ways in which the repurposing of photographs into newly desired objects with different signifying possibilities is affected by the appropriate material practices. Remediation as a method required me to attend to the range of what Keane calls the “bundled” sensorial and material affects.27 Edwards refers to these as “haptic” multisensory embodied relations that arise when individuals view, 476

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handle, wear, and move with photographs as they perform a sense of appropriateness. As I worked materially with each photograph in a creative process that required me to bring in and work with other materials, I drew from Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), which is a descriptive process formulated by Bruno Latour that calls upon the researcher to focus on the connections between both human and non-human entities that lead to new entities and does not discriminate between that which is human and non-human, instead approaching all entities as actuants.28 Actuants can be humans, animals, objects, and concepts, which are treated equally in an analytical sense. I approach ANT based on its congruence with Anishinabe ontology, which takes our realities as emergent, ongoing relationships between people, things, non-human entities, and the land—all of which are equal and in continuous movement within Creation. As I proceeded to work with each photograph, it was as if I was entering into a conversation with each person. As I actively worked with my materials, taking direction from the smaller details of each photograph that compelled me to act, I let the materials guide my direction. With every contemplative act I stitched together something that embodied my continued commitment to my ancestor’s stories. Each creative act helped propel this conversation forward as I remained attentive to how my body, in relation to the materials, helped reveal and re-inscribe ancestral knowledge. For example, as I created the quilted piece Ogichidaakwewag, I had to find a way to quilt the outline of the bodies of my great grandmother and two of her daughters, my aunts. As I started to place the black applique, I realized how much my work started to resemble a topographic map, where their black appliqued material stood for the vast lake systems in our territory. I then started to think about stories told to me about how young Anishinabekwe used to receive women’s teachings during long walks towards specific lakes. This reaffirmed teachings I have received around the role of women in protecting or looking after the water in our territory (Figure 36.2). As I worked with every material this conversation continued and I was able to strengthen my relationship paying attention to how every material act revealed knowledge related to my ancestors that I would not have learned without this process of making or doing. Methodologically, ‘making’ offered me opportunities to revisit images in ways that help tell stories of the past and create meanings that would otherwise go unnoticed. This acknowledges that photographs do not simply emit our stories about the past but can actively participate in their configuration and congealment. For example, as I was preparing the fabric for the piece called Cha-Is, I decided to recreate a photograph of my great-great grandmother, Ellen Deafey (Cha-Is) by carving stamp from a linoleum block. As I carved away pieces of the lineoleum with my blade, I felt like I was peeling back layers of time. I could sense Cha-Is, this woman who died long before I was born, scraping away at the outer layer of bark on the spruce root she used to collect to make her birch bark baskets. I could feel the strength of her hands and the roughness of her fingertips. When I rolled the paint over my block and pressed her portrait onto the fabric, repeating it over and over again, it became the pattern of the dress and I recalled my mother’s teachings of how it is really important to choose the right fabric pattern because it is the strongest part of your dress. The pattern is what brings everything together. As I worked, I remembered the stories told by women in my family, including my grandmother, about how Cha-Is brought people together. How she brought families together and how she assisted in large ceremonial gatherings and celebrations. Gatherings, which were prohibited through the Indian Act. 477

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Figure 36.2  Celeste Pedri-Spade, Ogichidaakwewag, 2016.  Image description: quilted image using a variety of textiles.

Conclusion As Anishinabeg, we often connect over this shared history of colonial violence. Indeed, many archival photographs created of our family members by colonial photographs remind us of our objectification and dehumanization. Through current systems based on Eurocentric concepts of justice and restitution, we are constantly compelled to prove the wrongs committed against us. To recount and relive the violence. Yet, Anishinabe are not by-products of violence and tragedy. We are strong innovators who have and continue to persevere. The photographs created and left behind for us by our family members that came before us remind us of this and at the same time inspire us to walk our own sovereign path. Photographs of our ancestors compel us to acknowledge and honor their lives. They inspire us to leave our own marks for future generations to experience and for our ancestors to witness. As an artist and visual anthropologist, the act of remaking photographs represents and reinscribes our legacy of struggle towards decolonization and because it involves Anishinabeg coming together within their home territory, to take control of the visual legacy of their ancestors and exercise self-determination in how Anishianbeg are made present today. This is Anishinabeg sovereignty. Our photographs do not just bring the past into the present. Through our embodied experience of them, they help present back a version of self to the past, a self that is not disengaged, disinterested, or disconnected but a self that walks with knowledge of and appreciation for all of the work done before us—as people who walk on the same lands as our ancestors did but are leaving our own footprints. This is what sovereignty is to me. Michelle H. Raheja argues that visual sovereignty is exercised by Indigenous artists and 478

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communities through creative acts of self-representation that dismantle Western stereotypes of ­Indigenous Peoples and strengthen the “intellectual health” of the community.29 In a similar point, Kristin L. Dowell argues that visual sovereignty is enacted through creative acts that make Indigenous stories visible.30 While visual sovereignty is about resistance, voice, self-representation, and the revitalization of Indigenous knowledge, our visual creative work revealed that at heart of Anishinabeg, sovereignty is belief. A belief that the footsteps of our ancestors will lead us to a good place. In other words, Anishinabeg sovereignty is an intense responsibility to our ancestors, their relationship with our Anishinabeg lands and our ongoing commitment to living in a way that reflects a respectful relationship with their life experiences and stories. It is a commitment to living out the teachings of our ancestors within our homelands. As an artist—as a maker—I see photography as a powerful tool in this struggle.

Notes 1 Anishinabekwewag means Ojibwe women. 2 See Celeste Pedri-Spade, “Nametoo: Evidence that He/She Is/Was Present,” Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education, and Society 3, no. 1 (2014): 73–100; Celeste Pedri-Spade, “Maamakaajichige Mazinaakizon: A Journey of Relating with/through Our Anishinabe Photographs” [Unpublished doctoral dissertation] (2016). University of Victoria, Canada; and Celeste Pedri-Spade, “‘But They Were Never Just the Master’s Tools’: The Use of Photography in Decolonial Praxis,” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous People 13, no. 2 (2017): 1–8. 3 For more on this, see Elizabeth Edwards, “Photographs and the Material Performance of the Past,” History and Theory 48, no. 4 (2008): 130–150. 4 Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (Washington: National Geographic, 2013), 17. 5 For more on this, see Amalia Pistilli Conrad, “‘A Many Splendoured Thing’: Liminality as Empowering Discursive Space in Rosalie Favell’s Digital Art,” in Henrietta Lidchi and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie eds., Visual Currencies: Reflections on Native Photography (Edinburgh: NMS Enterprises Limited, 2009); Veronica Passalacqua, “Finding Sovereignty through Relocation: Considering Photographic. Consumption,” in Visual Currencies (2009): 19–26; Jeff Thomas, “Emergency from the Shadow: First Peoples’ Photographic Perspectives,” in C. Payne and K. Kunard eds., The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada (Montreal: McGill’s University Press, 2011); and Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, “Dragonfly’s home,” in Visual Currencies (2009). 6 Trudi Smith, “Repeat Photography as a Method in Visual Anthropology,” Visual Anthropology Review 20 (2007): 183. 7 See Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Howard Morphy, “Landscape and the Reproduction of the Ancestral Past,” in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon eds., The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives of Place and Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Robert Snyder, Daniel R. Williams, and George Peterson, “Culture Loss and Sense of Place in Resource Valuation: Economics, Anthropology, and Indigenous Cultures,” in Svein Jentoft, Henry Minde and Ragnar Nilsen eds., Indigenous Peoples: Resource Management and Global Rights (Delft, The Netherlands: Eburon Academic Publishers, 2003); and Rina Swentzell, “Conflicting Landscape Values: The Santa Clara Pueblo and Day School,” in Paul Groth and Todd W. Bressi eds., Understanding Ordinary Landscapes, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1997). 8 Morten Søndergaard, “Flexowriters, Punch Paper Poetry, and Ontological Gaps: What Happened to the Unheard Avant-Gardes,” in Gundhild Borggreen and Rune Gade eds., Performing Archives, Archives of Performance (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013), 313. 9 Richard Vokes ed., Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer Inc., 2012). 10 Kathleen J. Martin, “Native Footprints: Photographs and Stories Written on the Land,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2, no. 2 (2013): 5. 11 See Jeff Thomas, “Emergency from the Shadow: First Peoples’ Photographic Perspectives,” 2011.

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Celeste Pedri-Spade 12 See Vine Deloria Jr. Power and Place Equals Personality: Power and Place: Indian Education in America (Golden: Fulcrum Resources, 2001). 13 Damien Lee, “Placing Knowledge as Resurgence,” InTensions 6 (2012): 1–27. 14 See Paul Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Paul Stoller, “The Bureau of Memories: Archives and Ephemera,” Society for Cultural Anthropology (March 20, 2015), accessed November 21, 2022, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-bureau-of-memories-archives-and-ephemera. 15 Stoller, “The Bureau of Memories: Archives and Ephemera,” 2015. 16 See Celeste Pedri-Spade, “‘But They Were Never Just the Master’s Tools’: The Use of Photography in Decolonial Praxis,” and Celeste Pedri-Spade, “Preservation and the Denial of Life: Towards the Emancipation of Our Sacred Relatives in the Mus(mausol)eum,” Fwd: Museums Journal 4 (2019): 95–102. 17 Sherry Farrell  Racette, “Returning Fire, Pointing the Canon: Aboriginal Photography as ­Resistance” (70–90), in C. Payne and K. Kunard eds., The Cultural Work of Photography in ­Canada (Montreal, Québec, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). 18 Dawn Marsden, “Expanding Knowledge Through Dreaming, Wampum and Visual Arts,” Pimatisiwin: A Journal of Aboriginal and Indigenous Community Health 2, no. 2 (2004): 53–73. 19 Stoller, “The Bureau of Memories: Archives and Ephemera,” 2015. 20 See Stephanie Bunn, “Materials in Making,” in T. Ingold, ed., Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, Movements, Lines (Surrey, United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2011); Elspeth Owen, “Give Me a Call,” in A. Grimshaw and A. Ravetz, eds., Visualizing Anthropology (Portland, Oregon: Intellect, 2005); and Tim Ingold, “Worlds of Sense and Sensing the World: A Response to Sarah Pink and David Howes,” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Social 19, no. 3 (2011): 313–317; and Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2013). 21 Christopher Wright, “Faletau’s Photocopy or the Mutability of Visual History in Roviana,” in Christopher Morton  and  Elizabeth Edwards, eds., Photography, Anthropology and History: ­Expanding the Frame (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate: Ashgate, 2009). 22 See Rebecca Coleman, “‘Be(come) Yourself Only Better’: Self-transformation and the Materialization of Images,” in L. Guillame and J. Hughes, eds., Deleuze and the Body (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2011). 23 Elizabeth Edwards, “Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the Image,” Annual Review of ­Anthropology 41 (2012): 221–234. 24 Ibid., 226. 25 For more on this, see Joshua A. Bell, “Promiscuous Things: Perspectives on Cultural Property Through Photographs in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea,” International Journal of Cultural Property 15, no. 2 (2008): 123–139; Rebecca Coleman, “‘Be(come) Yourself Only Better’: Self-transformation and the Materialization of Images,” in Guillaume, L. and Hughes, J., eds., Deleuze and the Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2011), 144–164; Alfred Gell, “The Problem Defined: The Need for an Anthropology of Art,” in Art and Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1–11; W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Christopher Wright, “Faletau’s Photocopy or the Mutability of Visual History in Roviana,” in Christopher A Morton and Elizabeth Edwards, eds., Photography, Anthropology, and History: Expanding the Frame (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate: Ashgate, 2019), 223–240. 26 See Celeste Pedri-Spade, “Maamakaajichige Mazinaakizon: A Journey of Relating with/Through Our Anishinabe Photographs,” 2016; and Celeste Pedri-Spade, “‘But They Were Never Just The Master’s Tools’: The Use of Photography in Decolonial Praxis,” 2017. 27 Webb Keane, “Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things,” in D. Miller, ed., Materiality (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 188. 28 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: ­Oxford University Press, 2005). 29 Michelle H. Raheja, “Reading Nanook’s Smile: Visual Sovereignty, Indigenous Revisions of ­Ethnography, and ‘Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner),’” American Quarterly 59, no. 4 (December 2007): 1161. 30 Kristin L. Dowell, From Sovereign Screens: Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast (­Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013).

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Selected Bibliography Coleman, Rebecca. “‘Be(come) Yourself Only Better’: Self-Transformation and the Materialization of Images.” In Deleuze and the Body. Edited by L. Guillame and J. Hughes. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2011. Deloria Jr., Vine. Power and Place Equals Personality: Power and Place: Indian Education in America. Golden: Fulcrum Resources, 2001. Edwards, Elizabeth. “Objects of Affect: Photography beyond the Image.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 221–234. Lee, Damien. “Placing Knowledge as Resurgence.” InTensions 6 (2012): 1–27. Martin, Kathleen J. “Native Footprints: Photographs and Stories Written on the Land.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2 (2) (2013): 1–24. Pedri-Spade, Celeste. “Nametoo: Evidence That He/She Is/Was Present.” Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education, and Society 3 (1) (2014): 73–100. Pedri-Spade, Celeste. “‘But They Were Never Just the Master’s Tools’: The Use of Photography in Decolonial Praxis.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 13 (2) (2017): 1–8. Pistilli Conrad, Amalia. “‘A Many Splendoured Thing’: Liminality as Empowering Discursive Space in Rosalie Favell’s Digital Art.” In Visual Currencies: Reflections on Native Photography. Edited by Henrietta Lidchi and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie. Edinburgh: NMS Enterprises Limited, 2009. Smith, Trudi. “Repeat Photography as a Method in Visual Anthropology.” Visual Anthropology Review 20 (2007): 179–200. Søndergaard, Morten. “Flexowriters, Punch Paper Poetry, and Ontological Gaps: What Happened to the Unheard Avant-Gardes.” In Performing Archives, Archives of Performance. Edited by Gundhild Borggreen and Rune Gade. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013. Stoller, Paul. Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa. New York: Routledge, 1995. Thomas, Jeff. “Emergency from the Shadow: First Peoples’ Photographic Perspectives.” In The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada. Edited by C. Payne and K. Kunard. Montreal: McGill’s University Press, 2011. Vokes, Richard ed. Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer Inc., 2012.

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37 REFLECTIONS ON A LATINX DECOLONIAL PRAXIS FOR MEDIEVALISTS Roland Betancourt

In her volume For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts, Latinx activist Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez closes her book with a chapter on decoloniality, urging her readers that: To re-exist, we have to reimagine life outside of coloniality. We have to reject our colonizer’s need to name and define us BIPOC. Decoloniality is a tool, a worldview, one that is always ready to be activated. When we divest from one colonial institution, like the assumed superiority found in elite university education, we know that there are still all the other institutions that exist right alongside it. We cannot undo centuries of colonialization, but we can resist its control over us.1 Aimed not at an academic audience but written as a “love letter to women of color,” Rodríguez’s volume means to make accessible to young Latinx women the lessons and warnings of intersectionality, decoloniality, respectability politics, the male gaze, and white fragility, discourses that have long been restricted to those with access to elite institutions of higher education and only more recently been made viable through online spaces, like tumblr and Twitter, by queer, trans, and other creators of color. Not only is this book powerful in its goals to expand ways of knowing, but poignant in its demonstration of the power of academic conversations in the world. Merging autobiographical reflections with the work of scholars, like Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, Rodríguez offers a proposition for what decolonial work can look like by cultivating practices of living outside of coloniality and outside of academic institutions, but that nevertheless shows the power and utility of scholarship. Rodríguez’s book is an invitation to live outside of coloniality through the methods and practices of our own subjectivities as Latinx peoples. In thinking through the remit of this volume to decolonize art history and the focus of this section on selfhood and representation, I want to articulate my argument here through the personal and embodied experience of being a Latinx art historian working on medieval art. This leads me to confront myself as both colonizer and colonized, while inhabiting this world as a settler, and working on art that is largely believed to be removed from the conditions and processes of coloniality. To propose a different read of the situation, I wish DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-43 482

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to begin by reflecting on my formative encounter with casta paintings. By narrating this experience, I feel that I can best contour my identity as a queer, often white-passing, Cuban, Latinx subject that palpably understands that they will never be decolonized; my own birth being the long-term by-product of a white supremacist, eugenic project initiated in the early days of colonialism. But from this analytic approach to grief and re-orientation, my interest is to describe how this subjectivity has contoured modes of self-reflection and mourning that have allowed me to “re-exist” in the world, as Rodríguez puts it. Via this encounter, I will describe how decoloniality has been a central tenet in how I have worked as a medieval art historian, seeking to deconstruct the Western epistemological frameworks that have limited our understanding of medieval art. My work, for instance, has sought to provide alternatives to narratives of gender identity, sexuality, and race in the Middle Ages that betray modern, Western, colonial Christianity’s expectations of what these categories should have looked like in the medieval past, which is a crucial step to decolonizing our histories so as to cultivate inclusive classrooms and audiences. For those wishing to learn more about the state of the field, I will close by briefly describing how Medieval Studies has begun to engage Indigenous Studies, beginning in critical race studies and moving into decolonial discourses. Much of this work has called out and deconstructed the colonial, white-supremacist histories of our field and is now working to develop decolonial practices for undertaking medieval history in dialogue and alongside our Indigenous colleagues in the field.

Introduction: We Will Never Be Decolonized To this day, I distinctly remember my first encounter with a casta painting, arguably what has been one of my more formative moments as an art historian. This encounter occurred sometime in 2010, after my first year of graduate school, in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Set against a pinkish wall in a corner dominated by shadows and spotlights, I saw four images: on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and attributed to the artist Buenaventura José Guiol.2 As is typical of the genre, these paintings each depict heterosexual couples from two distinctly racialized groups with their offspring.3 Critically, these triads are captioned to offer up terms with which to taxonomize the two parents and the progeny of their combination. Over the years, this moment has unfolded for me in different ways as I came into my own as an art historian, offering me different lessons at different times, which I wish to reflect upon here. Each of these lessons speak to certain conditions of my identity’s construction around colonial trauma, which I see as critical to the practice of decoloniality as an active and ongoing process. On that day, I remember feeling two immediate realizations in the encounter. First, there was a feeling of glee; glee at being able to look at a work of art and flawlessly read the words upon it in my native language. Before this moment, I had rarely been able to use Spanish in any art historical context. And, despite being fluently bilingual, my feelings of linguistic inadequacy had been a major source of concern during the arduous process of graduate school applications. Over the course of my first year in grad school, working on Byzantine art, my native language was repeatedly eroded of any value or significance in my mind, positioned always against the need to learn French and German as proper secondary languages for an art historian, not to mention my own primary research needs in Medieval Greek, and potentially, Russian, Turkish, Modern Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and so on. Staring 483

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at this casta painting, my Spanish provided me a necessary fluency that was not merely about literacy but also intimacy with the words on those canvases, which led to my second experience: grief. With this literacy came the simultaneous emphasis of the racialized taxonomies found in these casta paintings, not as historical artifacts of a foreign racism but as a lived reality of my childhood and the enduring legacies of these terms in Latinx households. What was perhaps even more disconcerting than the more familiar words were the carefully parsed out terms, like Coyote and Loba (She-Wolf) or the obstruse and difficult to translate Calpamulato. These terms denote multi-generational combinations of racial categories that were utterly foreign to me – and which seemed too specific, too cruel, and too outrageously dehumanizing to even seem real. Yet, while the terms might have been unrecognizable, their logic was one that I was intimately aware of as a colonized subject: a logic emerging from generations of careful and consistent monitoring for the construction, forging, and preservation of whiteness. This is a concept best summarized in the common phrase “mejorar la raza” (to “improve the race”) used by Latinxs communities to describe the constant vigilance surrounding the desire to produce white/r offspring and, also, to be conscious of the various potential “regressions” away from whiteness that might occur from within one’s own lineage. Other terms found in casta paintings, like “tente en el aire” (hold-yourself-in-the-air), “no te entiendo” (I-don’t-understand-you), and “torna atrás” (return-backwards/throwback), speak in even more palpable ways to the long, eugenic anxieties of racial policing that are deeply engrained in the colonial experience of many subjects, like myself, from across the Américas. It was this latter realization that I have carried with me over the years, maturing and evolving in its significance and signification, particularly as my work began to focus on issues of racialization and race-thinking in the medieval world. To look at a casta painting now is a cruel reminder of the early days of this white supremacist project, a mere snippet of a long-standing eugenic program of which I am now one of its wildest dreams. I am a byproduct, like some genetically modified organism, who was made to appear white. These paintings speak to me with their own emphatic literacy, speaking now in my other fluent language of art history. These visceral reflections put the history of art in a particularly necessary position to address, decompile, and recognize the armaments of the colonial power matrix across its enduring and ongoing history, providing modes of filiation and a feeling of history to those for whom it has been denied by coloniality. One of the great challenges of coloniality is that unlike empire or capitalism discretely, coloniality operates on a temporal scale much longer than that of any individual person or generation, instead playing a long game of occupation and possession that these casta paintings diagram across generations – these realities are visceral for any Latinx subject on a long, ancestral scale. To me, what casta paintings offer us Latinx people today is a powerful lesson and reminder that we will never be decolonized.

Grief and Re-Existence The statement, “we will never be decolonized” is not meant as a nod to Bruno Latour, nor is it meant as a resignation.4 Instead, it is meant to instill an awareness of the slow violence and out-of-scale of coloniality, which are not only historically discrete, but also ongoing and existing beyond an individual human’s experience.5 This sentiment that I describe 484

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here is one of an ancestral grief, and to me it comes to define grief as an analytical tool, as ­medievalist Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh has called it, by reflecting upon her own identity as a Muslim woman and having to confront daily the brutal violences against Muslim figures in her medieval archives.6 In this article, Rajabzadeh also reflects on how white academia encouraged her to exploit her own subjectivity for her own work and success. As Shokoofeh writes, “I had extracted what only she could see, and I had translated it out of her politicized, embodied language into a language I considered rigorous and authoritative –­ dispassionate and responsible.”7 This essay is a poignant reflection as to how grief can serve as an analytical tool, yet simultaneously be purged and distilled into language and theses that serve the respectability politics of our field and its own extractivism (emotional, intellectual, and otherwise). Shokoofeh’s words resonate with so much contemporary writing in Black critical thought, which offers various methodological formulations and analytical frameworks through a relationality with grief. In Christina Sharpe’s work, for example, to exist “in the Wake” constitutes a condition of simultaneous grief, remembrance, and action in the afterlife of slavery.8 Or, as in Saidiya Hartmann’s writing, critical fabulation serves as a tool for accessing grief when the subjects of said grief are purposely erased and denied in the historical record.9 In recent critiques of Latinidad as a concept that erases Black and Indigenous lives (a subject critically surveyed by Tatiana Flores), artists and activists have powerfully captured the grief inherent in the experiences and the inadequacies of Latinidad as we exist as colonizers, colonized, and settlers, oftentimes simultaneously.10 In looking at casta paintings, this is the ancestral grief that I feel, one best captured by the words of the ColombianFrench-American screenwriter Priscila García-Jacquier, who muses on her identity, saying, as quoted by Flores: In my white mestiza skin, I must acknowledge the ways I perpetuate an erasure of Indigenous communities that need accomplices, today. Simultaneously, I must reconcile that the very white of my skin is a product of an internalized self-hatred so deep, so ancestral, I will never be done unlearning. Without taking responsibility for all sides of this war, García-Jacquier goes on to say, “I will perpetuate the same violence that sought my birth to be this one. And that is a grief I simply cannot carry.”11 Here as well, grief becomes an analytical tool for recognizing harm, complicity, and new liberatory ways of thinking, which do not entail freedom or innocence, but a melancholic positionality. As a Latinx art historian, casta paintings are an invitation to grieve on a historical scale – and to act on a personal scale. Through these reflections, however, we confront the dangers of reducing decoloniality to mere analytical framework and metaphor. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have critically warned, decolonization is not a metaphor through which to think about a plurality of ethical causes and express grievances against a broad imperial state.12 Thinking through the complexities of the colonial power matrix historically and “unlearning imperialism” are critical to the project of decolonization, but these also exist as distinct projects in their own right.13 Tuck and Yang’s decade-old critique urges us to recognize how metaphor has been used to instantiate and preserve the conditions of coloniality by removing the political efficacy of decolonization (and other liberatory practices) and reducing it to a series of symbolic gestures that obfuscate the need for land restoration, the visibility and empowerment of Indigenous people, and the overall reevaluations of our value systems and taxonomies.14 485

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Throughout, Tuck and Yang outline the various “settler moves to innocence” that seek to claim a kinship to an Indigenous past, while imagining a settler future.15 This process can take on a variety of tactics, including the absolution of guilt by claiming an Indigenous ancestor, the rhetorical performance of sympathy and guilt, the conflation of various forms of oppression, and resulting in a merely theoretical articulation of colonialism and decolonization. As a Latinx settler, I am conscious of the ways in which these critiques can often map out onto the Latinx experience, where many of us are the descendants of Indigenous and Black peoples yet have benefitted and relied on the violence of our settler states and positionality to imagine futures for ourselves. This has often relied on the multi-generational purging of these Indigenous lineages. It is here that I see the critical operation of grief as an analytical tool to honor and connect to this past, rather than as an outward-facing performance that seeks innocence as a mode of settler futurity. This is a praxis that I understand as being deeply personal and, in many ways private – a fact that is inherently at odds with the act of sharing this with an outside audience as I write these words in a public-facing, edited volume. But I do so with the hopes of formulating modes of kinship with fellow Latinx people who are similarly navigating through the conflicted identities that coloniality has forged for us. Here, as well, I would like to highlight what I see as another implicit myth by white and other settler scholars that I believe harms the goals of a decolonial praxis: this being the myth that the end game or resolution of decoloniality is a completed project of decolonization. This often ties into the fetishized return to an Ur-state of Indigeneity, which derives from anthropological ideations of primitivism and is deeply tied to what Johannes Fabian once termed the “denial of coevalness.”16 Or, it suggests that the restitution of land alone could make up for the centuries of disruption, genocide, and extraction to which Indigenous lands and peoples have been subjected.17 Oftentimes, what is lost in these conversations is the reality of Indigenous people today as the starting point of these discourses and understanding that decolonization is a praxis of restitution and futurity. In our intellectual projects, it is critical that our work in every capacity can be used to learn, as Rodríguez states, to find ways to “re-exist … outside of coloniality.” Or, as Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith has written in her classic text Decolonizing Methodologies, “the intellectual project of decolonizing has to proceed through a colonizing world,” leading to a methodology of “radical compassion that reaches out, that seeks collaboration, and that is open to possibilities that can only be imagined as other things fall into place.”18 One of the key tenets of decoloniality has been repeatedly affirmed as a praxis of non-­ prescriptive plurality. As Walter Mignolo writes, “The answer to the question ‘What does it mean to decolonize?’ cannot be an abstract universal. It has to be answered by looking at other W questions: Who is doing it, where, why, and how?”19 For the historian, this entails that we work against the fictions of modernity and place a critical onus on delinking the tenets of the early modern period, understanding that coloniality is constitutive of modernity itself. As a medievalist, Mignolo’s work on the “Renaissance” and early modernity, in particular, is critical for thinking through possibilities of subversion, betrayal, and drain that the premodern past can offer in our contestation and disruption of modernity, the colonial power matrix, and the epistemologies that continue to uphold it.20 Understanding and articulating what it means to decolonize on a discrete personal and professional level is the first step to beginning to answer the question: “What does it mean to decolonize?” While we will never be decolonized, we can undertake a decolonial praxis, one that leverages our realities for these goals. 486

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Toward a Latinx Decolonial Praxis At this point, then, I wish to turn and consider what a decolonial praxis looks like through my own subjectivity as a Latinx scholar whose area of expertise lies within the realm of medieval art; more specifically, the art and culture of what modernity calls the Byzantine Empire.21 In my own work to date, decoloniality has taken up various forms and strategies of praxis. For instance, in an essay entitled “Beyond Foucault’s Laugh,” my efforts focused on projecting and proposing communal and para-academic forms of knowledge production that break away with the elite and restrictive power structures of Western academia, albeit more firmly grounded in postcolonial thought, yet proposing modes of collaborative and community-driven approaches to art historical research and curatorial work.22 While in an article entitled “Medieval Art after Duchamp,” I push against the thesis of “the image before the era of art” in Hans Belting’s Likeness and Presence (1990, English trans. 1994) to articulate how uncritical and atemporal definitions of art have served to sustain and enforce Western epistemological frameworks and arbitrary methods of how we regard a singular, atemporal definition of art.23 Such gestures, rather than democratizing art history, have worked to protect a history of art “proper” and reinforced exclusionary divisions that have weakened the field. And, more recently, in an essay on Kehinde Wiley’s citations of Byzantine art, I propose a model for thinking through decolonial appropriations of the art historical canon as a way of working beyond the structures and methods of a white, European epistemology.24 Most notably, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (2020) is committed to the work of a decolonial praxis in so far as it urges us to move beyond conceptions of gender and sexuality that have been constitutive of colonial power relations and reified as normative, particularly through colonial contact and its settler logics.25 In many ways, this project dared to think of the medieval past by foregoing all normative strictures, a process that is critical in our sincere engagements with the long-standing processes of racialization and cis-het normativity that have histories well before the constitution of modernity and coloniality. This was a project largely animated by grief – not just mournful grief for past queer, trans, and racialized lives, but an anguished grief that constantly stared at documents of brutality and erasure, always asking the question: How can there be so much hate, and how can there be so little trace? It is through these premodern histories that scholars of premodernity can best identify and combat the workings of the colonial power matrix and the ongoing violences of colonialization as an enduring practice. This current contribution cuts obliquely across these other works to articulate the self as a site of recognition from where the decolonial project must first emerge. Without this self-reflexivity and contemplation, we, as Latinx subjects, risk simultaneously becoming complicit with our settler identities and continuing in the process of our own self-erasure that has long rewarded us for living, imagining, and thriving in a Western, settler world. In some regards, I hope that this chapter serves as a prism through which to recognize my earlier frustrations and workings-against Western epistemological models, allowing them to serve as better accomplices to decoloniality. More specifically, I will say that as a historian of Byzantine art, I am deeply drawn to what this artifact of quasi-Western history might offer a decolonial re-envisioning of history. In my work, I have repeatedly seen in Byzantium the potential of its status as an unruly and floating signifier – always failing to adhere to the norms of a western Christian 487

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empire. There is perhaps no better exemplar of modern animosities toward Byzantium than the account presented by the English historian, Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a multivolume work whose first volume was published in 1776. There, Gibbon infamously speaks of “the servile and effeminate Greeks of Byzantium, who presumed to imitate the dress, and to usurp the dignity, of Roman senators.”26 Such remarks and sentiments arose alongside new stereotypes of the East, leading us to perceive a Byzantium that was at times far more defined by contemporaneous stereotypes against the Ottomans and the broader Islamic east than it was by the pious notion of a medieval Christian empire.27 In our art history survey books, Byzantium is often presented as an isolated, anachronic sliver of time and place, set off as its own discrete chapter, and covering well-over a millennium of history.28 This makes Byzantium a placeless cipher in relation to a linear Western history and amorphously disconnected from a broader semblance of a global medieval period. It is this marginality that has always drawn me to Byzantium as a space for critical, political work that can subvert our expectations, assumptions, or preconceptions of the Middle Ages, and, in doing so, contest the imperial logics of Western historiography.29 Today, scholars across Byzantine Studies have begun to question the colonialist practices of our discipline, both acknowledging the modern construct of “Byzantium” and its own modern and medieval complicities with empire, Western periodization, and colonial geographies.30 However, the most sustained work in decolonization has occurred within the broader context of Medieval Studies. In Medieval Studies, particularly coming from English, much of the work done in and around Indigenous Studies and decolonization has emerged through the scholarship and activism of anti-racist scholars, who have been seeking to call out and dismantle the complicities of the Middle Ages and Medieval Studies with white supremacy and settler colonialism. The work and activism of scholars like Geraldine Heng, Dorothy Kim, Seeta Chaganti, Sierra Lomuto, Cord Whitaker, Nahir Otaño Gracia, and Mary Rambaran-Olm has not only established the study of race, racialization, and race-thinking in Medieval Studies, but also contributed to tracing out how our scholarship and history is explicitly used by modern-day white supremacists (and our own colleagues) to promote and sustain white, settler goals.31 Indigenous scholars of Medieval Studies, like Adam Miyashiro (Kānaka Maoli), have also powerfully called out the field’s complicities with colonial practices, and generously sought to promote an Indigenous Medieval Studies, based on kinship and reciprocity, as in the ongoing work of Tarren Andrews (Bitterroot Salish) and Wallace Cleaves (Tongva).32 As a Latinx medievalist, what I see as most critical to my decolonial praxis is the production of histories that do not take as default white, cisgender, heterosexual readers and colleagues, but rather unfold possibilities and pasts that structure new investments and relationalities to the Middle Ages for audiences that had been previously disenfranchised, erased, or brutalized by these histories. I am able to do this, not simply because of my training, education, or experience, but through my experiences as a queer, Latinx person, who perceives documents, sources, and works of art in radically different ways than many of my colleagues do. Yet, these sensitivities must also be matched by a concerted and sincere desire to deconstruct the Western epistemological frameworks that have upheld our notions of art, legitimated areas of study, and established the methods and practices of how we undertake those studies. From this groundwork, we can then move to sincerely build relationships with colleagues and communities that can ask the more meaningful question of what a decolonial praxis might want and need from the premodern past. We must 488

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find ways to be enthusiastic accomplices and understand that decolonialization will be a lifetime, multi-generational process defined by an overall way of doing (art) history and being an (art) historian, not by a discrete methodological application nor as a theory to be extracted from Indigenous Studies.

Conclusion: How to Drain an Empire Dry? In closing, I wish to reassert two critical points that most decolonial practices share: first, that decoloniality cannot be done without the active consultation and sincere collaboration with Indigenous scholars, thinkers, and elders, and, second, that any attempt to decolonize intellectually will only be metaphoric if it does not include and involve the restitution of land. As a priority here, I see the promotion of work done by Indigenous scholars and the creation of opportunities, possibilities, and safeties for them to undertake their work. And this also entails an awareness of and an assurance that the aims, methods, and voices of Black scholars and activists are also not purged or separated from the workings of decoloniality, as if it were a project emerging solely from non-Black, Indigenous spaces. As the historiographic trajectory of Medieval Studies makes clear, Black critical thought has been foundational in the shifts that have led to conversations in and around decolonization in our field. In upholding these principles, I would like to encourage us to ask how we drain an empire dry? How do we work to divert the intellectual, financial, and prestige at our disposition to create spaces “that honor the foundations of kinship and reciprocity,” as suggested by Tarren Andrews?33 We must find ways to permit and enable Indigenous scholarship to thrive across our various areas of study, like art history and Medieval Studies, not just within the discrete spaces of Indigenous Studies, but ensure that this engagement is in good faith and not rooted in the extractive logic of new theories and methodologies. As a Latinx subject, these questions are as rigorously academic as they are deeply personal. I am invested in imagining the ways in which we can learn to honor our ancestors and histories, the knowledge of which has been stripped from many of us through the brutalities of colonization and white supremacy. I am invested in finding ways, academic and otherwise, to honor these pasts that as a historian are cruelly absent from my purview, while recognizing that this historicizing desire is itself a product of the logic of empire and the Western episteme. As Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez urges her readers at the end of her book, “desahógate,” that is, “unburden yourself” (literally, un-suffocate yourself). And I wish to close here with her critical words, “Yo me desahogue because that is how I resist a history of silence and complicity. Me desahogue para incomodarme.”34

Author’s Note As I write this contribution on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the Tongva and Acjachemen peoples, I wish to acknowledge the caretakers of this region who in the face of ongoing settler colonialism have continued to act as stewards of this land, water, and air. I wish to pay respect to their ancestors, elders, and relations – past, present, and emerging. Today, the continued presence and remnants of Spanish missions across the region are a palpable reminder of the instruments of colonization. In the storehouses of many of these missions are collections of medieval and early modern books and manuscripts that bear witness to the intellectual and spiritual weapons of colonization. As a medievalist, 489

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I am called upon to be a steward of this history and understand how the artifacts of the worlds I study were complicit or weaponized in the long and ongoing process of colonization. And I am also called upon to dismantle the white myths of the Middle Ages and their ongoing complicities with the justification and afterlives of the transatlantic slave trade. As a queer subject, I am compelled to remember and testify to the enduring work and activism of the two-spirit Indigenous community, whose labor not only has made this land livable for queer and trans people, but whose history also provides affirming and empowering narratives for our existence. Over time, this region has also become home to many diasporic communities of other Indigenous peoples, including Latinx communities. I too acknowledge that we inhabit this land as settlers, displaced by the events, ongoing actions, and incomprehensible scale of coloniality.

Notes 1 Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez, For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts: A Love Letter to Women of Color (New York: Seal Press, 2021), 208. There have been important critiques of “Brownness” and its complicities with Black erasure, though the term continues to be a potent and useful articulation for many persons of color, particularly young Latinx and Black people. For a useful critique, see Ren Ellis Neyra, “The Question of Ethics and the Semiotics of Brownness,” sx salon (October 2020), http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/discussions/ question-ethics-semiotics-brownness. 2 See Ana Zabía de la Mata, Five Casta Paintings by Buenaventura José Guiol, A New Discovery (Buenos Aires: Jaime Eguiguren Are y Antigüedades, 2011), 51–53. 3 See Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). See also Magali M. Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). 4 Cf. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 5 The concept of “slow violence” is particularly developed within the context of environmental destruction and its effects on poor, disempowered people. See Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Another useful concept to consider the oversized scale of certain conditions that afflict people only through shards of their effects, but cannot be fully and comprehensibly grasped, is that of the “hyperobject.” See Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (­Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 6 Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, “The Intellectual Body, the Body Intellectual,” Literature Compass 18, no.10 (2021): 1–7. See also Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim ­Erasure,” Literature Compass 16, no. 9–10 (2019): 1–8. 7 Rajabzadeh, “The Intellectual Body, the Body Intellectual,” 3. 8 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 9 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26, no.12, 2 (2008): 1–14. On a queer ­intervention on these ideas, see also Tavia Nyong’o, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York: New York University Press, 2019). 10 Tatiana Flores, “‘Latinidad is Cancelled:’ Confronting an Anti-Black Construct,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 3, no. 3 (2021): 58–79. 11 Cited in Flores, “‘Latinidad is Cancelled’,” 68. 12 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 1, no.1 (2012): 1–40. 13 On “unlearning imperialism,” see Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning ­Imperialism (New York: Verso, 2019).

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Reflections on a Latinx Decolonial Praxis for Medievalists 14 This latter point is more in line with the articulation of decoloniality as outlined by W ­ alter D. ­Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh. See Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On ­Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 15 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 10. 16 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), esp. 25–35. 17 On extractivism, see Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 18 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 3rd edition (London: Zed Books, 1999), 288. 19 Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality, 108. 20 See Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 21 For a survey of Byzantine historiography and the modern invention of “Byzantium,” see Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff (eds.), The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2021). See also Roland Betancourt and Ambereen Dadabhoy, “Geographies of Race: Constructions of ­Constantinople/Istanbul in the Western European Imaginary,” in Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World, eds. Noémie Ndiaye and Lia Markey (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2023) [Forthcoming]. 22 See Roland Betancourt, “Beyond Foucault’s Laugh: On the Ethical Practice of Medieval Art ­History,” in Postcolonising the Medieval Image, eds. Eva Frojmovic and Catherine E. Karkov (London: Routledge, 2017), 144–166. 23 See Roland Betancourt, “Medieval Art after Duchamp: Hans Belting’s Likeness and Presence at 25,” Gesta 55, no. 1 (2016): 5–17. 24 See Roland Betancourt, “The Exiles of Byzantium: Form, Historiography, and Recuperation,” Disturbing Times: Medieval Pasts, Reimagined Futures, eds. Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei, ­Catherine Karkov and Anna Kłosowska (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2020), 213–243. 25 See Roland Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). 26 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, new edition, 4 vols. (London: W. W. Gibbings, 1890), 2:278. 27 Recent scholarship has also turned to look at how the colonization of the Américas was narrated through comparisons to the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans, looking at a comparative analysis of collective memory and trauma between Byzantium and the Américas. See Eleni Kefala, The Conquered: Byzantium and America on the Cusp of Modernity (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2020). 28 See Robert S. Nelson, “The Map of Art History,” The Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (1997): 28–40. 29 For a model of alternatives to western historiography offered by Byzantium through a postcolonial lens, see Roland Betancourt, “Prolepsis and Anticipation: The Apocalyptic Futurity of the Now, East and West,” A Companion to the Premodern Apocalypse, ed. Michael A. Ryan (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 176–204. 30 See Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova (eds.), Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? Towards a Critical Historiography (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023 [Forthcoming]. 31 This is an extensive and growing bibliography. For some places to begin, see Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Dorothy Kim, “Introduction: Critical Race and the Middle Ages,” Literature Compass 16, nos. 9–10 (2019): 1–16; Seeta Chaganti, “Solidarity and the Medieval Invention of Race,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 9, no. 1 (2022): 122–131; Sierra Lomuto, “Becoming Postmedieval: The Stakes of the Global Middle Ages,” Postmedieval 11, no. 4 (2020): 503–512; Cord J. Whitaker, Black Metaphors: How Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-­ Thinking (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); Nahir I. Otaño Gracia, “Towards a ­Decentered Global North Atlantic: Blackness in the Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd,” Literature Compass 16, nos. 9–10 (2019): 1–16.

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Roland Betancourt 32 Tarren Andrews and Tiffany Beechy (eds.), “Indigenous Futures and Medieval Pasts” Special Issue, English Language Notes 58, no. 2 (2020). Of particular note in this volume is the work of Tarren Andrews, “Indigenous Futures and Medieval Pasts: An Introduction,” English Language Notes 58, no. 2 (2020): 1–17; Wallace Cleaves, “From Monmouth to Madoc to Māori: The Myth of Medieval Colonization and an Indigenous Alternative,” English Language Notes 58, no. 2 (2020): 21–34. See also Adam Miyashiro, “Our Deeper Past: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Medieval Heritage Politics,” Literature Compass 16, nos. 9–10 (2019): 1–11. 33 Andrews, “Indigenous Futures and Medieval Pasts,” 14. 34 Rodríguez, For Brown Girls, 217–218.

Selected Bibliography Anderson, Benjamin and Mirela Ivanova (eds.). Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? T ­ owards a Critical Historiography (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023). Andrews, Tarren. “Indigenous Futures and Medieval Pasts: An Introduction,” English Language Notes 58:2 (2020): 1–17. Betancourt, Roland. “Beyond Foucault’s Laugh: On the Ethical Practice of Medieval Art History,” Postcolonising the Medieval Image, eds. Eva Frojmovic and Catherine E. Karkov (London: Routledge, 2017), 144–166. Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 2018). Lomuto, Sierra. “Becoming Postmedieval: The Stakes of the Global Middle Ages,” Postmedieval 11:4 (2020): 503–512. Miyashiro, Adam. “Our Deeper Past: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Medieval Heritage Politics,” Literature Compass 16:9–10 (2019): 1–11. Rajabzadeh, Shokoofeh. “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure,” Literature Compass 16:9–10 (2019): 1–8. Rodríguez, Prisca Dorcas Mojica. For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts: A Love ­Letter to Women of Color (New York: Seal Press, 2021).

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38 THE WATERS SURROUNDING WALLMAPU, THE WATERS SURROUNDING LIFE Seba Calfuqueo

Water: The Beginning of Life In 2021, for an individual show at the Patricia Ready Gallery in Santiago, Chile, I set up an installation called Palabras a las aguas (Words to the Waters) (see Figure 38.1). It included a 70-meter cloth that ran through the gallery’s main hall, inviting spectators to actively participate in the exhibit. The deep blue fabric simulated a torrent or waterfall, lit up by a blue LED light, with the following phrase written on it: “A river that doesn’t run is only a reflection.” In a way, the twists and turns of this large blue fabric resembled a uterus. Twelve ceramic pieces were scattered over the cloth, each one a kind of half sphere measuring 50 × 50 cm, on which we could read phrases like, “the Blue is sacred,” “water is the basis of life,” “rivers cannot be intervened,” “life cannot be intervened,” “the world is water,” and “don’t separate the earth from water.” Meanwhile, a series of audio testimonies complemented the exhibit’s sensorial experience. But even so, considering the audio’s mobility and the organic nature of the cloth, Palabras a las aguas has been interrupted, just like the rivers that are currently intervened and ransacked by the colonial state of Chile. Over 3,500 million years ago, water gave the planet the first forms of life. Water is what makes our planet unique, cultivating millions of life forms under different climatic, geographic, and physiological conditions. Water enabled the development of the first human settlements next to basins, lakes, and rivers, and it was used as future roads for trade and migration. Our bodies are made up of 70% water. This means that water is essential for our existence. However, since modernity and the world’s simultaneous industrialization, our connection with water has been radically affected. In our current Anthropocene period—in which humans are the planet’s central axle and Eurocentric perspectives consider nature and culture as two opposing entities—our connection with the land has not only been separated but also estranged. In other words, capitalist modernity established that “nature” is an obstacle for “civilization,” something that must be dominated and exploited.1 Let’s say it again: fresh water is a vital element for life, a limited and endangered resource. It is no surprise that major droughts have produced some of history’s most significant

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-44

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Figure 38.1  Seba Calfuqueo, Words to the Waters, 2021. Installation. Blue fabric (70 mt), 12 blue enameled ceramics with text written in white, 3 blue LED lights and 2 audio c­ hannels. Photograph by Diego Argote.

migrations. In fact, several Indigenous peoples consider water a higher entity, a “living being” with a spirit whose rights are more important than human existence. At the heart of my work, I attempt to represent the waters surrounding Wallmapu, like those ever-flowing waters that surround life.

Water Surrounding the Historic Territory of Wallmapu In the mid-nineteenth century, Chile and Argentina began their expansion toward Mapuche territory, historically known as Wallmapu.2 This process of colonization carried out by both nation-states culminated in the territory’s plunder and reorganization, separating Puelmapu (Land of the east) from Gulu Mapu (Land of the west), and incorporating these territories into what is currently known as Argentina and Chile. On the Chilean side of the Andes, the state’s military campaign, euphemistically called the “Pacification of the Araucanía,” uprooted the Mapuche political system and shattered the territorial autonomy of Gulu Mapu. Since 1861, this colonization process has impoverished Mapuche people and provoked large migrations to urban centers, especially the capital of Santiago.3 Thus, Chile was founded as a unitary nation, denying the pre-existence of the Mapuche people in these lands, infringing upon Indigenous rights and promoting a single cultural model that defined what it meant to be “Chilean.” In school, I was taught that my people were only part of the past, stripped of any current agency or voice to look toward the future. The lands that were stolen from us were given to immigrants (which history has called “settlers”) and also to neocolonial companies, which today are destroying the biodiversity throughout Chile’s forests, rivers, and oceans. For many years, we have lived in the shadows of the state, which consolidated only one possible national identity: Chilean. 494

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I was raised in a profoundly racist society, where we were not called Mapuche, but Indians. In this society, being Mapuche was associated to fixed stereotypes and even used as a degrading term, discouraging my people from maintaining our own cultural practices or speaking our language, Mapudungun. As a response to this historically accumulated violence, I decided to study visual arts in order to create images that could reconstruct the world and history through connections with other species. I was interested in recovering our language through work that questioned the racist colonial system and its consequences on human and non-human bodies, as well as contemplating the relationship between extractivism and dispossession constructed by Chile’s dominant historical narrative. I was also interested in reflecting on all this violence in relationship to one of the darkest periods of Chilean history: the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). One legacy from this period is the Constitution of 1980, which provided an institutional framework for the privatization of common goods4 that benefited countless private companies, in particular timber companies.5 To this day, the Constitution continues to harbor many of the country’s inequalities. Water, for example, was covered by the Water Code (1981), which, on the one hand, considers this vital element a national good for public use, but, on the other, a “moveable” good that is tradable on the stock market. This code was designed by Chilean economists who had studied at the University of Chicago and helped to usher in neoliberal policies during the dictatorship. One of the characteristics of this neoliberal model was based on the privatization of water, from its source to its commercialization. This was translated through the concept of “the right to exploit water,” formulated by Chile’s General Directorate of Water Resources (DGA by its Spanish acronym). According to the DGA, this Code establishes two kinds of water exploitation rights: consumptive and non-consumptive use. Consumptive use refers to the consumption of water that cannot be reutilized (for example, agriculture, mining, industry, and human consumption) and non-consumptive use is when water is utilized and then return it to its original course in the same quantity and quality (for example, hydroelectricity and fish farming).6 While the “water rights” system was supposed to efficiently allocate water, the state only favored businesses in the agricultural, timber, and mining industries, as well as hydroelectric companies and large landowners. Inconceivable on the international level, these industries have special privileges that not only include free water rights but also the possibility of extending those rights to a “perpetual” status. Indiscriminately using water on a large scale, this state policy has provoked serious hydric problems in communities that do not benefit from such rights, primarily the rural and indigenous populations. Kowkülen, which means “liquid being” in Mapudungun, is a video performance that I created in 2019 and exhibited at a show called Ko ñi weychan (The Struggles of Water) (see Figure 38.2). Organized by Mapuche researcher and curator Cristián Vargas Paillahueque, who is also a dear friend, the installation was shown at the Metropolitan Gallery in March 2020. The 3-minute video was recorded in Wallmapu, in a branch of the Cautín River, near Curacautín, in the Araucanía Region. In the video, one can see my body melding into the landscape, absorbed by the waters of the lewfü (river). My body in the water initiates a relationship with the rocks that inhabit this territory; these rocks cleanse the water that flows down from the mountain springs, safeguarding the river’s natural cycle toward all its tributaries. These waters pull me along the currents, alluding to me along the currents, alluding to our vitality and the ngen who protect the biodiversity. In the last scene, viewers can see my body tied to a large trunk, using the Japanese technique shibari. And I write: My body is water/I blend into water/These are my politics / Ingkañpeafiel trayenko, witrunko, traytrayko/Tüfa taiñ duam, pikeiñ / Water is territory. 495

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Figure 38.2  Seba Calfuqueo, Kowkülen (Liquid Being, 2020), Video, 4K, 3 minutes.

The text that accompanies this piece articulates a critical reflection on Chile’s water code. For example, “Ingkañpeafiel trayenko, witrunko, traytrayko” refers to the defense of liquid bodies: springs, pools, waterfalls, among others. Since the code does not regulate or establish criteria for water use, water can be traded on the market just as any other private good, an interest protected by the dictatorship’s constitution. As detailed in Article 19, no. 24 of the code, “The rights that private individuals have over water, recognized or constituted according to the law, will grant ownership to its title holders.”7 The Water Code also separates the property of water from land ownership, dividing and commercializing its purchase and sale. Those who possess these rights do not pay for maintenance, possession, or use, shamelessly increasing their profits at the expense of the territory and common goods. Likewise, the DGA has handed over 90% of the country’s basins to private companies and has yet to investigate complaints over water theft. In Chile, not only do we pay one of the highest water fees in Latin America, but also 90% of the companies that distribute water are transnational corporations, the majority European, sustaining an interventionalist dynamic initiated by their empires during the colonial invasion. This entire system is framed within an extractivist, capitalist worldview, which establishes borders, decides on the best places to live, and exploits other places in order to gain global privileges. Kowkülen is accompanied by the sound of the river’s water. The audio also includes a text, which, according to Cristián Vargas Paillahueque, reveals anachronisms and complex relations between different terms like itrofill mongen or ad mongen, which allow us to enter and exit different Mapuche and non-­Mapuche imaginaries and attempt to intertwine the defense of water from a 496

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perspective of peoples’ rights. One of the artist’s strategies lies in the text’s malleability, sometimes in Spanish and other times in Mapudungun, as if this gesture emulated the transversality of a model in crisis that, in this country, affects all peoples.8 The work inhabits a complex territory of constant state and police violence, and it denounces the ways in which timber and hydroelectric companies have destroyed the quality of life that these lands once offered. This is how the text is installed from a perspective that criticizes monoculture plantations, their extraction, and depredation, all the while exposing the struggles of communities and peoples that coexist with such extractivist projects. The text criticizes the position of the market over life. And, therefore, when the river takes me away, I write: Neoliberal extractivism/The market over life/20 liters, 20 liters, 20 liters, of water a day/Eucalyptus, pines, and avocados/Mapu kishu angkükelay, kakelu angkümmapukey.9 Kimün, or knowledge in Mapudungun, proposes other kinds of relationships with water and nature, showing us a worldview in which the elements are part of a larger whole. No life form is superior to another, everything is connected, everything is integrated. The word Mapuche refers to two central ideas: earth (mapu) and people (che). As Rodrigo Becerra and Gabriel Llanquinao explain, “To be che (a person) corresponds to an element of the natural world, where the individual is one more thing of and in nature, essential like all forms of life that exist in a relationship of equilibrium.”10 We do not only speak of “elements,” rather a more complex whole that implies relationships and interactions. Instead, Western thought, based on an anthropocentric perspective, establishes that the human is at the center of the world, a rational subject disassociated from the animal kingdom. But, in the Mapuche worldview, one thing is certain: human beings are, Neither better nor worse; neither larger nor smaller than an insect, a tree, or an animal. The che, once united with the mapu, is Mapuche. In this sense, Mapuche men and women form part of the universe (wallontu mapu) and, therefore, are integrated into every component of nature. Thus, the Mapuche is animal, tree, star, river, volcano, sea, mountain, insect, moon, sun, thunder, rain, water, stone, flower, life, and death.11

Other Affective Relationships with Nature The concept of itrofil mongen12 allows us to better perceive the connection between the Mapuche people and “landscape.” The first word, itrofil, refers to all forms of existence, a key principle to recognize other species as equals. Mapuche poet Elicura Chihuailaf defines this concept as “the whole of the living world, understanding and insisting on its unity […] The biodiversity and the biosphere are not only limited by a natural order. It is also physical, social, and cultural.”13 The ngen are known as beings that inhabit spaces connected to nature; they are the protectors that guard all living things. These forces guard what exist and, therefore, act in the presence of human beings. They are fundamental for equilibrium. The relationship of humans with these beings must always be from the ekun.14 When we enter a natural space, we must ask permission from the ngen that inhabits and guards that space. When we extract something, we must leave an offering to maintain the equilibrium. Everything functions from the reciprocity of actions: nature gives but also takes. 497

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This relationship where the human is part of nature and coexists within it differs from the colonial ­relationship imposed upon the world. This relationship of reciprocity is explored in another recent video installation that I helped create: Mapu kufull15 (Mushrooms). The work deals with the “Pacification of the Araucanía” and shows the relationship of communities and the extraction of edible mushrooms used during this period to compensate hunger. The video shows how to extract mushrooms and the relationship of respect with nature, asking the ngen for permission before extracting the needed element. The concept of landscape in visual arts is based on observing the natural and the universal, and connects human beings with the external world. The interpretation of landscape, then, is objective, and the relationship between experience and environment loses meaning. For the Mapuche world, it is impossible to comprehend the environment this way. According to Rodrigo Becerra and Gabriel Llanquinao, For Mapuche culture, the conceptualization of landscape is directly related to the Mapuche worldview. In fact, landscape itself corresponds to a central aspect of culture. This is clearly expressed through the names of different territorial identities that have their origin in the territory’s physiographic and plant characteristics (for example, Mapuche Pewenche, Lhafkenche, Nagche, Wenteche, Rankülche). Additionally, most sectors and communities owe their name to some characteristic of landscape (for example, the communities in this study: Llaguepulli means “land of llagues [blackberries]’). Therefore, as a manifestation of the territory, landscape has sociocultural interpretations on both a small and large scale: it sustains the identification and local social organization, and shapes large territorial identities, respectively.16 Ko means “water” in Mapudungun. Its ngen is called ngen ko. Water is never alone. Different forms of ngen ko inhabit and protect the waters. These ngen ko reside in clean waters, seas, lakes, and rivers. Never disappearing, they are represented in different ways, associated to both aquatic and terrestrial bodies. Arrüm ko is one of these forms. It is usually associated with frogs, which, simultaneously, are associated with abundance and rain. In Mapuche territories, it is said one should not intervene in the waters that protect this ngen because its cycles can be altered and dry up. All of this happens close to the mountains, in the Pehuenche area near the Alto Biobío, where Mapuche women have historically given their lives to protect the land and its diversity of life. Such is the case of the Quintremán sisters. During the 1990s, a hydroelectric dam was built in Ralco Lepoy, removing the communities that lived there and flooding an Indigenous cemetery with 700 grave sites. To this day, the cemetery remains underwater, on the property of the Spanish/Italian company ENDESA. Lamngen Nicolasa Quintremán opposed this project, which was initiated in dictatorship and supported by the transitional governments of the 1990s. Nicolasa’s fight for the lake ended up killing her. In 2013, she was found dead, floating in Lake Ralco, the same which she had protected with her life in what would become the country’s first environmentalist movement. In the territory of Lake Ralco, people tell stories of Punalka, the protector of the Fiu Fiu River,17 one of the largest bodies of water in Wallmapu. Punalka protects the waters from the extractitivist projects that ravage the area. In the Cautín River, on the other hand, people talk about Kallfü pangi, a blue puma that guards the waters of that liquid body. Close to the ocean, in the areas of San Juan de la Costa, in Osorno, and along the coast of Valdivia, people speak of Wentellao and Mankian. These tales are about men who were turned into 498

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stones and protect the coastal shores. Mankian, for example, was a teenager who mocked nature and was turned into stone and then into a ngen-ko, the owner of the waters who lives within him.18

Shumpall, Intersections between Man and Woman From my perspective, one of the most fascinating figures associated with bodies of water in Wallmapu is the Shompallwe or Shumpall, a figure that escapes the margins of binary gender. The Shompallwe are masculine, feminine, and even intersexual or ambiguous ­beings. As Carrasco, explains, The expression shompallwe was first mentioned in a Mapuche fisherman’s prayer from Lake Panguipulli, recorded at the beginning of the 20th century by a Capuchin missionary. This expression was the local name for one who own’s water, that is, an  aquatic god. In other words, the expression was a term limited to a very small region at that time. In the Capuchin writings from the early 20th century, the expression shompallwe is mentioned, along with other Mapuche expressions from other regions, in order to designate the owners of water. Such was the situation until the mid-20th century. However, in the second half of the 20th century, the word shumpall, an abbreviated version of shompallwe, was suddenly known in different places of the Mapuche world as a term for aquatic gods, whether masculine or feminine.19 Shumpall is a ngen-ko. People say that “if shumpall is in the water, it won’t ever dry up.” This deity is also related to reciprocity: this ngen receives offerings but also provides gifts. In several epew,20 reciprocity exists as a central element of the relation between life and the world. At the same time, the Mapuche connection with water is also linked to the relationship between life and death. When people leave the terrestrial world, their püllu, or spirits, begin a journey into the wenu mapu,21 the land above, where they meet the profound Blue of their ancestors who live there. Whales, called trempülkawe, carry the souls of the dead toward the ngüllcheñmaywe,22 where they meet the elders and travel to the cosmos. The cornerstone of my work in Kowkülen celebrates the potential of water to avoid being categorized into gender binaries imposed by the West, taking the figure of the Shumpall as a non-binary being who disrupts the narrow conceptions of anthropocentrism. If we study nature from a decolonized perspective, we notice that the ideas of male and female, which have historically been imposed upon us, are flawed, as are the limited diversity of possibilities and representations they offer. Nature is not binary, rather a force that misaligns hegemonic powers that have acted on our bodies. Non-binary waters, like a form of recognizing ourselves in other liquid, fluid bodies that adapt to different vessels and forms. This is why, in my video Kowkülen, I write: Wanting to be a fish/with no recognizable sex/ Like shumpall, interstices of man, of woman/Non-binary waters […] that cross basins/that (are) cleans (ed) with rocks/Healing sediments/Kurake lawen.23

Landscape Integrated into Life, Integrated into the Body Other variants of ngen ko are also related to the trayenko,24 a concept of natural and spiritual space that has the potential to cleanse people. When a wanderer enters a body of water like the trayenko, a respectful dialogue must be initiated with the ngen, in which gratitude 499

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is shown through an offering. For example, people often toss into the water wheat grains, coins, and seeds. Mapuche thought and spirituality are also connected through the menoko, reservoirs that filtrate water between the rivers and ocean. The menoko are fundamental for Mapuche surroundings and spirituality. In fact, many machi25 and lawentuchefe26 travel these spaces to gather medicinal herbs that will later be used in ceremonies and for healing illnesses. Today, given the accelerated global warming and its consequences for the ecosystem, lawen27 is in danger. This is even more serious, considering that timber companies are drying up bodies of water in Wallmapu, producing a large-scale desertification which prevents other species from growing outside the monoculture of eucalyptus and pines. Bodies of water are born in the mountains, flow through basins, cross rivers, and reach the sea. This cycle has multiple impacts on the landscape. Earth’s water must flow freely, respecting its natural cycle. It must not stop. We must move forward to reclaim water rights, encompassing rivers, lakes, and springs. We must move forward in an ethical regulation that recommends limits and priorities for water use, where nothing is above life. A gesture toward decolonization of the concept of “nature” that invites us to talk with the land in a non-colonial exchange, comprehending its cycles, its finitude, without limiting its potential solely to anthropocentric pleasures. Moving toward a system that changes the world’s anthropocentrism, toward an ecocentric turn, whose regulatory framework is environmental ethics for the future. This task invites us to integrate liquid bodies within the ecosystems and, thus, consider ourselves part of this whole to achieve a good quality of life. We must understand that common goods and culture are fundamental parts of life.28 This shift urges us to think about liquid bodies as subjects with rights, without direct intervention and allowing the ngen to exist. This new paradigm recognizes other life forms, expanding the figure of rights to other species, not only human. And not solely from the perspective of recognition, but also out of love and understanding that we are part of the relationships that connect life to the world. Water is an inherent part of history, spirituality, and politics. It cannot be separated or used for merely extractivist dynamics. The challenge I assume as an artist is to disrupt human emotions and turn toward other affective forms of relating, where recognizing the potential of nature is not tradable on the market. This new form of interaction allows us to imagine a future of horizontal relationships that foster dialogue toward an encounter with different species. My work is positioned from that necessity, thinking of an Indigenous future, which we have been denied since colonialism devastated our territories. This Indigenous future can teach us to respect nature, where common goods are a transversal axle that help us understand how nature lives within our own bodies Translated from Spanish by Thomás Rothe.

Author’s Note I wish to thank Jorge Pérez Roldán and Florencia San Martín for reviewing and helping me edit this text.

Notes 1 Scientists and scholars in the last ten years have written their visions of a planet in crisis, a spate of literature that addresses a ‘no future’ paradigm and how life on the planet will soon be destroyed. The broad adoption of the term “Anthropocene” is a key shift in our willingness to acknowledge the impact the human has had on the planet. 2 Mapuche territory that spans from the Pacific to the Atlantic Coast.

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The Waters Surrounding Wallmapu, the Waters Surrounding Life 3 According to Martín Correa and Eduardo Mella, “the reduction of Mapuche communities […] meant that, throughout Mapuche territory, a total of 2,918 Land Titles were distributed, taking into account the provinces of Arauco, Biobío, Malleco, Cautín, Valdivia, and Osorno, totaling 510,386 hectares for 82,629 people, nearly over 6 hectares per person.” M. Correa and E. Mella, Las razones del ilkun/enojo. Memoria, despojo y criminalización en el territorio mapuche de Malleco (Santiago de Chile: LOM Editores, 2010), 65. 4 When we refer to common goods, we move away from the Eurocentric extractivist perspective that sees water as a natural resource, that is, a source of riches that can be exploited for profit. 5 In the words of Héctor Nahuelpan, Edgars Martínez, Álvaro Hofflinger, and Pablo Millalen, “The constitution of private property for timber companies was produced during the civic-military dictatorship (1973–1990) with the acquisition, through low-priced auctions, of Mapuche lands and State-owned cellulose industries. This process was consolidated through public subsidies for the timber monoculture plantations (Decree Law No. 701), promoted by the dictatorship and subsequent democratic governments, which offered incentives covering 75% of the costs of monoculture plantations and tax exemptions for their owners. From 1974 to 2013, the State provided US $875,000,000 through Decree Law 701, of which nearly US $600,000,000, approximately 70%, was given to two major timber companies: Arauco y Mininco.” 6 Frêne Cristián and Andrade Pedro, Agua en Chile, Diagnósticos territoriales y propuestas para enfrentar la crisis hídrica (Chile: 2014). 7 Taken from the Water Code (1981), which continues to regulate water use today. 8 Cristián Vargas Paillahueque (2020), KO KONÜMPAKEY TAÑI WEYCHAN (El agua rememora sus luchas). Sobre Ko ñi Weychan, de Sebastián Calfuqueo, Artishock. 9 Original text from Kowkülen. The last phrase could be translated as “The earth does not dry up by itself, someone dries it.” 10 Rodrigo Becerra and Gabriel Llanquinao, Mapun kimün: Relaciones mapunche entre persona, tiempo y espacio (Santiago, Chile: Editorial 8 libros, 2017). 11 Collaborative text by Yvo Bravo Valderrama, Rodrigo Becerra Parra, Octavio Huaiquillan Meliñir, Fresia Mellico Avendaño, and Sandra Vita Vita in Mapun kimün: Relaciones mapunche entre persona, tiempo y espacio (Santiago, Chile: Editorial 8 libros). 12 A rough translation would be “all forms of existence.” 13 Rodrigo Becerra and Gabriel Llanquinao, Mapun kimün: Relaciones mapunche entre persona, tiempo y espacio (Santiago, Chile: Editorial 8 libros, 2017). 14 The word for “Respecto” in Mapudungun. 15 This work was a collaborative effort with many close friends, including Valderrama Cayuman, Eli wewentxu, Fer Walüng, Jorge Pérez, among others. 16 Rodrigo Becerra and Gabriel Llanquinao, Mapun kimün: Relaciones mapunche entre persona, tiempo y espacio (Santiago, Chile: Editorial 8 libros, 2017). 17 The Mapudungun name for the Bio Bio River, historical border that delimits Wallmapu. 18 Maria Ester Grebe, “El subsistema de los ngen en la religiosidad mapuche,” Revista Chilena de Antropología 1255 (1994): 2. 19 Hugo Carrasco, “El mito de Shumpall en relatos orales Mapuches,” MA Dissertation, Universidad Austral de Chile (1981). 20 Se refiere a un relato similar a la fábula, donde animales y seres no humanos personifican la tradición oral mapuche. 21 Refers to the “earth above” or the cosmos. 22 According to Febrés (1765), “Ngullcheñman ‘ir a parar allí, o morirse,’” in Félix Augusta, ed, Diccionario araucano-español- español/araucano (Padre Las Casas: Imprenta San Francisco, 1916), 63. 23 Original text from Kowkülen. The last phrase can be translated as “Stones that heal/cleanse.” 24 Refers to spaces with falling water, such as rapids or waterfalls. 25 Ancestral and spiritual authority for the Mapuche people. 26 Herbalist who maintains ancestral knowledge of plants and their medicinal use. 27 This concept can be translated as “remedies.” It is directly related to the ancestral knowledge of plants. 28 As sociologist Ximena Cuadra explains, “With the surge of neoliberal politics, these ideas were spread by promoting the supposed bonanza that would come with privatizing water, forests, and protected areas, among others, not only claiming economic benefits, but also environmental

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Seba Calfuqueo protection. For years, local communities were denied the possibility of developing policies regarding common goods.” See Ximena Cuadra Montoya. “Afirmar los bienes comunes desde el Wallmapu,” Yene Revista, 2020. Retrieved from: https://yenerevista.com/2020/06/17/ afirmar-los-bienes-comunes-naturales-desde-el-wallmapu/#_ftn2.

Selected Bibliography Becerra, Rodrigo and Gabriel Llanquinao, editors. Mapun kimün: Relaciones mapunche entre persona, tiempo y espacio. Santiago, Chile: Editorial 8 libros, 2017. Carrasco, Hugo. “El mito de Shumpall en relatos orales Mapuches.” MA Thesis. Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, Universidad Austral de Chile, 1981. Correa, M. and E. Mella. Las razones del ilkun/enojo. Memoria, despojo y criminalización en el territorio mapuche de Malleco. Santiago, Chile: LOM Editores, 2010. Cuadra Montoya, Ximena. “Afirmar los bienes comunes desde el Wallmapu, Yene revista.” (2020). Retrieved from: https://yenerevista.com/2020/06/17/afirmar-los-bienes-comunes-naturales-desde-elwallmapu/#_ftn2. Grebe, Maria Ester. “El subsistema de los ngen en la religiosidad mapuche.” Revista Chilena de ­Antropología 12 (1994): 2. Vargas Paillahueque, Cristián. “KO KONÜMPAKEY TAÑI WEYCHAN (El agua rememora sus ­luchas). Sobre Ko ñi Weychan, de Sebastián Calfuqueo, Artishock,” 2020. https://artishockrevista. com/2020/11/28/ko-ni-weychan-sebastian-calfuqueo/.

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39 DIALOGICAL EPISODES FOR DECOLONIZING (ART) HISTORY Ana María Reyes

In February 2018, Janet Echelman’s Earth Time 1.78, Madrid billowed and swayed atop a statue of King Phillip II (1556–1598) mounted on horseback in the Plaza Mayor.1 The dialogic relation between the US artist’s undulating nylon web and the Spanish monarch’s bronze sculpture, diametrically different in their forms and intent, helps us visualize a key component of decolonial practices: a new reconceptualization of power that takes us away from the sovereign and authoritative towards a decentered and relational mode of resistance, creation, and re-existence.2 Many people contributed their vision, talents, and technical skills into both sculptures’ production. However, the identities of the two Italian artists who created the equestrian monument, Giovanni da Bologna and Pietro di Tacca, are subsumed by the sitter: the King of Spain and a vast global empire. Elevated atop a tall stone pedestal and separated from pedestrians by a cast-iron fence, the representation of the sovereign is privileged, distinguished, and inaccessible. Its bronze materiality embodies the heft and might of the Hapsburg dynasty and its domains. Earth Time, Madrid 1.78 also commands our upward gaze and our marvel at its technological virtuosity, yet it stands for a different form of power – decentered inter-relationality. It makes reference not to an imperial convention but to a modest yet ancient practice of fishnet-making.3 The threads are poetically activated by natural and artificial light, wind, and other atmospheric elements contingent on local conditions. The net’s threads appear delicate, yet its materiality and multifocal anchors challenge the weight-bearing capacities of the metal structure. Indeed, the nylon and polyethylene fibers can carry 15 times more weight than steel, much more than what bronze can withstand.4 Its strength derives from being anchored to the surrounding buildings, its network of pressure points dispersed throughout, and its adaptability to its environment. It offers a horizontal relational power that contrasts the hierarchical model of European imperialism. This insightful dialogue allows us to consider alternative modes of creativity that shift our gaze from the sovereign artist towards dialogical practices, which in turn offer us a means to decolonize (art) history. Art historian Grant Kester differentiates between participatory practices that follow the historical avant-garde’s critique of discourse, a form of dialectics of negation, and dialogical processes “that conceive of the relationship between the viewer and the work of art […] not simply as an instantaneous, prediscursive flash of insight, but as a decentering, a movement 503

DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-45

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outside self (and self-interest) through dialogue through extended time.”5 What Kester calls “orthopedic aesthetics […] can also entail the paradoxical negation of the viewer as a unique individual.”6 In contrast, dialogical techniques refer to intersubjective exchanges that co-create knowledge, and when the dialogue is symmetrical the process can generate ethical insights. Therefore, dialogics can be understood as forms of generative collaboration where equals come together to formulate solutions to problems. In order to combat the instrumentalizing effects of hierarchic epistemologies, theorists have adopted dialogical methods in pedagogy and aesthetics.7 In his influential book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire articulated a strategy to “decolonize the mind” through dialogical pedagogy.8 Subsequently, Augusto Boal took Freire’s ideas into the realm of aesthetics by fostering co-authorship of theatrical scripts with the audience, thus, surrendering control over the final performance.9 Since then, many artists have been deeply influenced by Freire and Boal and participative-action methodologies. As facilitators they stimulate critical thought, action, and co-authorship rather than dictate solutions.10 From these artistic practices we can learn about the decolonizing possibilities of dialogical art in co-creating non-hierarchical power relations and new ways of being in the world. Echelman’s woven structure summons the words by Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “From ancient times through the present, weavers and astrologer-poets … have revealed to us an alternative and subversive thread of knowledge and practices capable of restoring the world and setting it on the rightful course.”11 I pick up on Rivera Cusicanqui’s invitation to look at the metaphysical and allegorical dimensions of weaving, not only as a practice that produces aesthetic objects, but as a way of knowing and relating to the world with powerful methodological implications. Weaving serves as simile for the dialogical relations necessary for cultural and methodological decolonization: it be a collective and collaborative practice but also produces a relational object. By this I mean, the fabric is constituted by the relationship of threads from the warp and the weft. Moreover, interlacing and interrogating have entangled linguistic roots. Inter-, the Latin for between or in the midst of is a preposition and hence a relational prefix. The Latin root reg- signifies to move in a straight line, to direct, lead, or rule (as is regnabit or to reign). Following this logic, interlacing of the warp by the weft is a challenge to the former’s straight line as interrogation can be the interception of a sovereign’s directive. Weaving thus provides apt metaphors for two types of decolonial practices: collaborative co-creations and interrogations of authoritative narratives. With this in mind, I turn to works that follow Rivera Cusicanqui’s “subversive thread of knowledge and practices” with the dialogical works The Columbus Assembly (2022) by Carlos Motta and Un Caso de Reparación (2015) by Liliana Angulo Cortés, which are the materialization of collaborative and interrogative processes. The Columbus Assembly (2022) (see Figure 39.1) is the product of Carlos Motta’s residency at the Wexner Art Center in Columbus, Ohio, where he worked with curator Lucy Zimmerman and a multidisciplinary team that considered the idea of renaming the city of Columbus.12 The most visible component of this participative-research-action is an installation that premiered at Motta’s exhibition Your Monsters, Our Idols (2022). The museum visitor enters a large room painted in white with the floor covered in vibrant red carpet. Woven into the carpet with black thread is the word Columbus and stenciled onto the back wall is the word BELOVED. Lured by the arabesque and somewhat difficult-todiscern letters that compose “BELOVED,” the visitor moves through the room, stepping over “­Columbus.” About midway through, one can discern a conversation that is emitted 504

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Figure 39.1  Janet Echelman, Earthtime 1. 78 Madrid, Madrid Spain, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

through eight speakers hanging from the ceiling. Each speaker channels a distinct voice engaged in a discussion over the challenges of the changing of the city’s name. The Columbus Assembly announces itself as a forum, one that provides a visual, sonic, spatial, and discursive experience. Nonetheless, the installation is the manifestation of a lengthier year-long dialogical process that involved many interlocutors in complex exchanges. Motta and Zimmerman invited three panels of artists, scholars, activists, and writers who engaged in lively discussions. The conversations were transcribed and edited, read aloud by eight actors, and transmitted by eight speakers channeling each individual. Finally, the transcript was printed as a booklet available at the exhibition and through Wex’s webpage.13 I had the pleasure of participating in the first panel, when we were asked to contemplate legal questions and institutional mechanisms for reparative justice.14 The second panel considered the role of symbolic and historical representations in the public space and whether interventions could “queer” or transform hegemonic narratives. The third and last panel focused on social justice and the impact on the communities that such a name change would serve.15 While none of the invited participants objected to the name change, most agreed that material and infrastructural changes need to accompany symbolic gestures. The panels arrived at conclusions put forth by decolonial scholars such as Alberto Albán Achinte, who have warned about the limitations of official discourses of diversity and inclusion if they obfuscate the decolonization necessary to address social inequality.16 Land acknowledgements, truth commissions, and symbolic measures can potentially derail structural changes necessary. Architectural historian Mabel O. Wilson located Columbus’s name within a 505

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toolkit of domination, including private property, law, history, as well as ­commemorations. Material monuments, Wilson reminds us, do not work alone, but rather “are part of a system of archives and museums that produce these sites and these histories. That is why they’re often so difficult to dislodge.”17 Rather than commemorate a figure associated with the banishment and erasure of the Indigenous people of Ohio, Joseph Pierce, member of the Cherokee nation, suggested that we listen to the land and “the peoples who have sustained it for millennia,” precisely because Indigenous origin stories give us instructions on how to care for the land. Indigenous scholar Kate Beane shared her and her families’ story about leading the campaign to restore the name Bde Maka Ska, the Dakota name for Lake Calhoun in Minnesota. Despite the harassment they received, they ultimately triumphed. Significantly, George Floyd’s girlfriend recalled “his favorite place [to be] Bde Maka Ska.” Evidently, the name meant something to those who had been formerly intimidated by the affluent white community that lives on its shores and nearby.18 Motta asked the panelists to think about how “people relate to a name that has been naturalized through everyday use? […] Does the name of the city affect the way life takes place in it?” Jamaican artist Ambrose Dupree gave a concrete example of willful naming with impact. Black Queer Intersectional Columbus changed its name to Black Queer Intersectional Collective allowing for more expansive community. Professor Martin Joseph Ponce invited us to think of a Black queer futurity worth commemorating. Poet and activist Saeed Jones invoked the power of art to get people to talk, to have a conversation “that will inform how we relate to one another moving forward.” A literary reference, a beautiful word, could bring people together; “people would just love to say, ‘Oh, Beloved, Ohio.’ ” Upon close inspection of the stenciled BELOVED one notices that each letter is composed by Jones’s idea: “I thought of Toni Morrison, she is a proud daughter of Ohio, part of the state’s wonderful literary history. What if we renamed Columbus after her most famous book: Beloved, Ohio to honor her?” While the cursive ZapFino font, its ligatures, character variations, and text’s multi-directionality make B E L O V E D difficult to read, the visitor hears the very words spoken by an actor. Meanwhile, Columbus is woven into the carpet’s fabric with Gothic script and provocatively surrounded by a sea of red pigment. The contrast between the block script for Columbus and the lyrical, elegant, Victorian calligraphy for Beloved evokes the passage from the medieval religious zeal that accompanied Columbus and conquistadores to the civilizing mission of the British Empire. These formal subtleties suggest change over time, but the endurance of epistemic colonialism. More specifically, the English translation of Columbus’s given Italian surname Colombo points to anglocentric authority. Lucy Zimmerman reminded us that the font was inspired by the newspaper the Columbus Dispatch, the city’s mainstream paper since 1871.19 The Dispatch presumes civic participation to be anglophone and contingent on alphabetic literacy. Furthermore, the origins of the word dispatch connote conquest. “To dispatch” conventionally means to “send off,” as in the Catholic monarchs launching Columbus westward or “to expedite” or “hasten” as in the daily paper. According to its etymology, the old English use of “dispatch” during the 1520s meant “to get rid of promptly by killing.” The Columbus Dispatch, therefore, holds a gruesome association with the conquest of the American continent during that time. In other words, the term dispatch connoted both physical and epistemic violence concurrent with the fall of Tenochtitlan (1521) and the European invasion that killed and plundered millions of Indigenous peoples. Susan Stryker inadvertently made this connection by 506

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characterizing the phrase “Spirit of Columbus” as a white settler mindset and the precursor to Manifest Destiny, that is, the belief that Europe and later the United States were divinely ordained to expand their territory. And yet, the formal properties of the words as images – the heavy bold blocks of the Gothic style that contrast the light and gestural Victorian cursive – point to other modes of knowledge that are non-alphabetic. While the term Beloved does not undermine the structures of power embedded in the English language, it references Toni Morrison’s book turning our gaze towards suppressed histories, stories of resistance, Black intellectuals like Morrison, and invites us to imagine alternative modes of civic identity-formation. The attentive listening to the conversation and rigorous viewing of the installation – reading ­between the lines, searching for what has been obscured and silenced – brings us to the poem by Indigo Gonzales Miller, “Listening as Acknowledgment” (2022), that preambles The Columbus Assembly booklet. The poem concludes: Listening as an acknowledgement of what I do and do not know Listening as an acknowledgment of what I can and can no longer carry Listening as an acknowledgment, in the stillness between each breath Of Asking: Who Am I, in relation to you? Gonzales addresses how land acknowledgements are one-way speech acts that do not necessarily invite us to mutual recognition. They are not dialogical or relational. Instead, listening and recognizing are essential components of dialogue and powerful tools of decoloniality. According to philosopher Gemma Corradi Fiumara, the act of listening is not the passive reception of potentially instrumentalizing directives, but a creative action in itself.20 Kester considers “discursive interaction [a form of] empathetic identification.”21 Complete empathy is an impossibility, and per Emmanuel Levinas, undesirable because it cancels the Other’s reason to be.22 Yet Kester explains that attentive listening is worthwhile: We can never claim to fully inhabit the other’s subject position … we can imagine it, and this imagination, this approximation, can radically alter our sense of who we are. It can become a basis for communication and understanding across differences of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on… [While] empathy is subject to its own kind of ethical abuse – the arrogance of speaking for others – … the process of collaborative production… can help generate [ethical] insight.23 Kester picks up on both Coriadi Fiumara’s reassessment listening and the feminist notion of “connected knowing” to evaluate contemporary dialogical art practices. Through listening attentively, the subject redefines selfhood “to both know and feel our connectedness with others.”24 The symmetry of the dialogical exchange can rehearse an ethical relationship. This exercise, which acknowledges another’s right to speech, reinforces the idea that this is a form of restitution or reparation in itself. Ethical insights can also be produced through attentive looking, listening, and interacting with the archive – that is, rigorous interrogations of dominant narratives. Decolonization involves ethical and creative challenges to official records, reconstructing histories that confront Eurocentric mythologies of universalism and superiority. Literary scholar Saidiya Hartman has eloquently provided a model of creative dialogical relations with fragments in 507

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Figure 39.2 The Columbus Assembly, 2022. A project by Carlos Motta commissioned by and image courtesy of the Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University. Installation view in Carlos Motta: Your Monsters, Our Idols.

the archive or “critical fabulation.”25 This method is at the heart of Colombian artist ­Liliana Angulo Cortés’s practices. Un Caso de Reparación, 2015 (Figures 39.2 and 39.3) is an itinerant installation that interrogates the archive in order to debunk myths woven into Colombian conceptions of history and nation. It rectifies the historical record and challenges the hegemonic narrative around nation-building by foregrounding Afro-descendant26 protagonists of the Real Expedición Botánica del Nuevo Reino de Granada (Royal Botanical Expedition of New Kingdom of Granada, 1783–1816) led by José Celestino M ­ utis on behalf of the Spanish Crown. The Expedición Mutisiana, as it is known, is widely considered the product of Spanish and criollo enlightenment and an important institutional antecedent for New Grenadian independence from Spain.27 Instead, Angulo focuses on Afro-descendant artists and naturists, along with others who have been erased through these “foundational fictions.”28 Un Caso de Reparación involves several multi-­media i­nstallations with archival materials that varied according to the venue, a website where obscure documents become accessible to a broader audience,29 and several participative-­research-anti-racist-actions that Angulo co-created with Afro-descendant artists, students, and organizations, including the Red Nacional de Mujeres Afrocolombianas Kambirí and the Corporación Afrocolombiana de Desarrollo Social y Cultural Carabantú. While Un Caso de Reparación is an ongoing and evolving project, so far it has been installed in Madrid, Medellín, Cartagena, and Bogotá.30 The project originated with Angulo’s participation in the artists’ residency El Ranchito on the occasion of Arco: Colombia 2015 in Madrid. She was initially interested in 508

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Figure 39.3  Liliana Angulo Cortés, Un caso de reparación. Un proyecto de reparación histórica y humanidades digitales, Collective Exhibition, “Mutis Mutare” 2015, El Ranchito ­Residence – Colombia – Matadero, Madrid. Photographer Paco López.

researching the colonial mining industry in the Barbacoas region of southwestern Colombia, where her ancestors labored in the gold mines. However, the residency’s mandate required that she work with the Royal Botanical Gardens. She decided to mine the Expedition’s archives for information pertaining to Afro-descendants, as well as the Archivo de Indias located in the former royal markets (Real Lonja de Comerciantes) in Seville, where the first Spanish contracts permitting human enslavement were signed. The Expedición Mutisiana has become part of a Colombian foundational narrative that characterizes Mutis and his criollo pupils as major ideologues of independence.31 Angulo unearthed lesser-known facts about the robust Afro-descendant participation in the Expedition. The first iteration of Un Caso de Reparación took place in Matadero, Madrid, an old slaughterhouse turned art space. Capitalizing on the violent history of the building, Angulo used wooden balconies from the Teatro Español that reminded her of the colonial architecture in Barbacoas.32 Nonetheless, the dramatically lit rustic structures that emanate from a dark room at first glance evoke the cargo crates that transported botanical specimens to the Royal Botanical Gardens. It also conjures ship cargo holds of the Atlantic Slave Trade, where humans, nature, and knowledge were colonized, commodified, and traded for the accumulation of wealth in Europe. The artist recalls learning about the care given to the plants so that they would survive the voyage – including openings in the crates for sunlight to come through – which sharply contrasts the dismal conditions that enslaved people experienced on those same ships.33 In the corner, a stoplight illuminates a large mapa mundi directly at the oceanic region between Western Africa and Recife Brazil, a key part 509

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of the Middle Passage. On the wooden supports, Angulo placed botanical i­llustrations, ­pedagogical charts, books, and manuscripts. Among the documents displayed are the lists and correspondence pertaining to the people enslaved by José Celestino Mutis and by his brother Manuel Mutis for the Royal Mining Enterprises. These letters reveal the exploitative logic of all three institutions: mining, botany, and slavery.34 Ingeniously, Angulo stamped the first large-format publications of the Botanical Expedition illustrations35 with an ex libris alerting readers, This work would not have been possible without the knowledge of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples, as well as forced labor and the sacrifice of human lives of the original communities that were enslaved by the Europeans in Abya Yala and Af-Rui-Ka.36 This form of savvy graffiti calls attention to the absence of proper attribution, the lack of due credit, or truthful acknowledgements. It reveals the mechanism of myth-making by which knowledge and labor were appropriated for the benefit of the Spanish Crown and the criollo elites, while also acknowledging the violence underlying these famously handsome illustrations. Un Caso de Reparación was later reinstalled in the exhibition Encuentro Internacional de Arte de Medellín (MDE15, 2015). This installation was the product of a research-­actioncreation in collaboration with the Museo de Antioquia (henceforth MDA), curator Carolina Chacón Bernal, artists and students Astrid González, Darily Chaverra, William Murillo, Karen Sánchez, Daniela Giraldo; Deyanira Valdés from Kambirí; as well as Carlos Santos and Ramón Perea from Carabantú.37 Angulo also invited digital humanities Professor Edward Arriaga to help the team create video displays. The first task, however, was to search the museum collection for material culture that represented the robust Afro-descendant communities in Antioquia.38 Rather than representing a rich and dynamic history, Angulo’s research team found just a few artifacts. This unexpected dearth could be explained by the museum’s biased history: the MDA was formerly the Museo y Biblioteca de Zea (f. 1881), a cabinet of curiosities amassed by elite criollos who promoted the idea of a superior white Antioqueño “race.”39 Museums like MDA are deeply implicated in buttressing a colonial matrix of power. Not only are their collections populated with objects amassed through looting, but they sustain Eurocentric conceptions of civilization and modernity. After independence, Latin American elites appropriated Indigenous treasures and archeological sites as “national patrimony” in a grand gesture that replicated the previous colonial order. What the team unearthed were largely painful references to that history, such as a sales invoice for a young man named Calisto signed by Francisco Joseph de Piedrahita dated July 17, 1800, in which the enslaver ironically, or rather revealingly, spends much ink describing his honorable reputation. In the MDE15 Caso de Reparación, the viewer does not experience the heavy wooden Spanish-colonial balconies, the ship holds, or warehouses of Seville, but rather an elegant salon with forest green walls displaying framed illustrations and manuscripts, populated with mahogany cabinets showcasing books and other signifiers of a learned society, as well as other material culture evoking the “illustrious men” who bequeathed the initial collection (Figure 39.4). Colombian audiences relate to the Expedición Mutisiana differently than Spaniards. In Iberia, the Expedition memorializes the reconquest of American resources 510

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Figure 39.4  Liliana Angulo Cortés – “Un caso de reparación. Un proyecto de reparación histórica y humanidades digitales” collective exhibition MDE15 – Museo de Antioquia – Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia, 2015.  Courtesy of the artist and the Museo de Antioquia.

during the late eighteenth-century Bourbon Reforms. Latin Americans, on the other hand, have mythologized the institution as the work of enlightened men whose patriotic fervor eventually led the nation towards independence. Angulo plays with the aesthetics of this cultural patrimony to overturn the myth and instead demonstrate how the Expedición Mutisiana was deeply interlaced with the history of Afro-descendants, both their indispensable contributions and their brutal exploitation. Angulo works with collaborators and addresses audiences who are seldom represented in Colombian museums and who would be interested in their ancestral connections to this celebrated institution. In fact, the lead administrator of the Botanical Expedition was the Afro-descendant artist Salvador Rizo from Mompox who was illustrator of some of the most remarkably beautiful botanical illustrations of the era and director of the Expedition’s painting school. There he trained botanical illustrators, many of them Indigenous and Afro-descendant.40 Rizo’s mentor, Pablo Caballero, was also Afro-descendant. Caballero was initially hired as artistic director but resigned due to the treacherous journeys and difficult work, unsuitable for a highly solicited portrait artist like himself who was working in a major colonial city like Cartagena de Indias. Angulo proved the fallacy of conventional historical accounts that claim Mutis appointed Francisco José de Caldas, a criollo independence martyr, to the Expedition’s directorship, by retrieving Mutis’s testament in which he clearly willed it to Rizo. This is an important revelation that divulges a pattern of bias, deceitfulness, and concealment characteristic of the National Academy of History. As Angulo’s bookplate asserts, the Expedición Mutisiana “would not have been possible without the knowledge [and labor] of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples.”41 In fact, much of 511

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the medical experimentation was performed on bodies of enslaved people; such was the case in the former Jesuit Hacienda Los Estangues in Venezuela where bonded mothers and children were treated experimentally with quinine. One manuscript tells the story of a man named Pío, enslaved by José Armero, who demonstrated the antidote for serpent venom by allowing a snake to bite him. In this case, Pío was both researcher and patient. Angulo betrays the process by which nature and knowledge were colonized by Spain to be later recolonized by criollo elites. An extraordinary manuscript captures the knowledge Mutis gathered from a man named Caetano Quezada enslaved at the Hacienda del Espinal, a former Jesuit Hacienda in La Mesa. Dated May 20, 1783, it consists of nine pages of Mutis’s handwritten transcription of Quezada’s vast medicinal knowledge. In this manuscript, Quezada describes around 150 specimens, a wide variety of plants, birds, insects, as well as their uses. The vernacular names were later replaced by the Linnean system in what Angulo characterizes as “the process of colonizing knowledge from all colonial territories by Europeans, which we call science.”42 Here is yet another example of linguistic erasure and epistemic extractivism.43 Un Caso de Reparación converses with Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum – a watershed moment for curatorial practices and creative interventions in museum collections. At the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, Wilson brought into productive juxtapositions material culture rarely exhibited together – such as metal shackles used to confine laborers displayed alongside luxurious silverworks for serving plantation owners who enslaved them. This dialectic visibilizes the violent apparatuses of wealth-extraction obscured by the myth of European “civilization.” Likewise, Angulo juxtaposes disciplinary weapons with documents written by “enlightened men.” That is, in a mahogany and glass vitrine, Angulo flanks the sales invoice of Calisto, drafted by Francisco Joseph de Piedrahita, with a baton and whip that share material origins: vegetal fiber (paper/wood handle). On the adjacent wall, Angulo positioned four botanical illustrations that frame five handwritten texts relating to enslaved workers owned by the botanical expedition. In this case, it is not only wealth alone that is extracted but also knowledge, the appropriation of which we learn from the documents on display. The Haitian flag with its motto L’Union Fait la Force (Unity Makes Strength) evocatively crowns the curated wall and vitrines. This unifying symbol shifts our gaze towards a different historical account or collective identity beyond the nation-state – an alternative that unifies Africa and the African diaspora. On a nearby wall, Angulo arranged a series of maps of Medellín and Antioquia from the Comisión Corográfica, a republican reformulation of the Expedición Mutisiana led by Agustín Codazzi, along with a costumbrista scene of Medellín’s central plaza, and most conspicuously a framed reproduction of Henry Price’s Portrait of a Black Woman. Province of Medellín (1852). This watercolor was commissioned for the Comisión Corográfica the year of formal abolition of slavery in Colombia (1851). This striking painting of an unnamed Afro-descendant woman, dressed in white and wearing a bright orange shawl over her shoulders, summons Angulo’s earlier work Presencia Negra: Portrait of Lucy Rengifo (2007) – a photographic recreation of Price’s portrait.44 According to critic Nicolás ­Vizcaíno Sánchez, the photograph of the visually stunning Lucy Rengifo is An act of memory, not of a granted freedom but of the multiple ways in which ­enslaved descendants of Africans managed to free themselves from captivity. The names of self-liberation activists that come to mind include Paula de Eguiluz, Pedro Antonio Ibargüen, Barule, or of course the Biohó dynasty.45 512

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This inter-image dialogue suggests a direct line from the extractive practices from colonial times to this day. The women’s presence in nineteenth- and twenty-first-century Medellín is significant. Colombia has been mythologized to be a racially segregated country, as Peter Wade has demonstrated in his study of the social and spatial construction of racial categories in ­Colombia.46 Medellín, nestled in the Andean mountain range, has been fallaciously identified as a white city and Afro-descendants have been spatially and conceptually confined to the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines. This racialization of Antioquia’s capital city was fostered by the same men whose collections established the museum. Nancy Appelbaum demonstrates that this segregation was a calculated plan outlined in the nineteenth-century Comisión Corográfica.47 The new republic sought to focus their resources to developing the Andean mountainous region, where elites considered whites and mestizos to be more industrious. Meanwhile, the Pacific Coast was deliberately neglected due to racist stigmatizations of Afro-descendant communities being less willing to work. Evidence of an Afrodescendant woman in Medellín during the mid-nineteenth century buttresses efforts by archeologists and activists who unearth this denied presence.48 Restaging the nineteenth-century portrait with a proper name in Presencia Negra was not accidental. Angulo met and admired Lucy Rengifo – a political science student at her university – who reminded her of Price’s watercolor. She even imagined that the anonymous woman in Medellín could potentially be Rengifo’s great-great-grandmother. Naming victims is a powerful means to humanize, memorialize, and provide a place for their families to grieve. This becomes complicated when African-born victims of enslavement were stripped of their given names and forced to adopt Christian ones. When available, oftentimes our access to those names comes from revictimizing documents such as sales invoices, property logs, criminal records, or “runaway ads.” Un Caso de Reparación thematizes the epistemic violence embedded into the archive. Similarly, Carlos Motta interrogated the archive in some of his previous works to show how our understanding of sexual difference was also constructed and regulated through the violent process of colonization. He retrieved silenced subjects when they intersect with legal frameworks.49 That is, their appearance in the archive is due precisely to their mode of existence being negated in official discourse. Motta explains, “categories of difference: sodomite, slave, hermaphrodite – have gone hand-in-hand with the historical criminalization of categories of identity that have cyclically reproduced in the legal and cultural fields up to the present date.”50 In Un Caso de Reparación, we also learn about dissident moments, such as the man Antonio who ran away from the Expedition and who Mutis sought to discipline and re-enslave; or the case of Luciano Caballero, a freed man who had to prove his freedom in court to avoid re-enslaving. These are registers of both violence and resistance. Angulo’s research produced a remarkable finding: the African name of a pregnant woman named Usnus (or possibly Isnus) from Guinea. This name became a powerful presence for Angulo. Likewise, Saidiya Hartman was haunted by the brief mention of a young girl, Venus, whose existence was revealed to her as a specter in the archive who appears at the moment her life was violently extinguished.51 They invite us to think about who they were and what may have been? Hartman explains, By advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the “capacities of the subjunctive” (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, possibilities), in fashioning a narrative, which is based upon archival research, and by that I mean 513

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a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I ­intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling.52 This capacity of the subjective opens the way for Hartman’s methodology of critical ­fabulation, which is a dialogic practice with the archive.53 Attentive looking and listening to the archive can help us co-conspire with it in order to interrogate mythologized history. Returning to the weaving metaphor, a dialogical approach allows us to weave counternarratives into the fabric of history. The fragments found in archives set the course for the kind of creative and ethical interventions that make Venus and Usnus present in our world. Angulo interlaces Salvador Rizo, Pablo Caballero, Calisto, Nero, Pío, Antonio, and Luciano Caballero into our historical consciousness. These absent-for-too-long presences open space for other figures and narratives to be knitted back into the historical fabric. To deliver Afro-descendants in Colombia, the birthname of an abducted African woman, Usnus, is a powerful act of reparation. Angulo not only makes the case for reparations but indeed is a case of symbolic reparations for Afro-descendants, who continue to experience intense marginalization and discrimination. A Case for Reparations operates at several levels: it interrogates the archive, rectifies a white-washed history, and retrieves the leading role of Afro-descendants as artists, administrators, and knowledge-producers. Moreover, Angulo makes a more specific claim of restitution by petitioning that the Royal Botanical Gardens return to Afro-descendants all documents pertaining to their ancestors. Akin to renaming of Columbus, Ohio (or the country of Colombia), this would be a small gesture considering the incalculable crimes against humanity committed in name and benefit of the Spanish Crown. It would open a path towards historical recovery so important for the continued struggles for justice. I have shown two different forms of dialogical practices put at the service of decolonizing objectives, to both challenge the mythologies of dominant narratives and to co-create new forms of relational existence. Dialogical approaches to creation are a powerful method of decolonizing. They move us away from the single voice, or the myth of the artist-genius, and towards an understanding of power relations that are horizontal and inclusive.

Notes 1 Grigore D. Pintilie, Peter Heppel, and Janet Echelman, “Interactive Design and Simulation of Net Sculptures,” In Taylor, R., Boulanger, P., Krüger, A., Olivier, P. (eds.), Smart Graphics. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6133 (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2010): 68–79. For an image and video of the work see https://www.echelman.com/#/project/1–78-madrid/ 2 Adolfo Albán Achinte, “¿Interculturalidad Sin Descolonialidad? Colonialidades Circulantes y Practices de Re-Existencia,” Diversidad, Interculturalidad y Construcción de Ciudad, Villa y Grueso, eds. (Bogotá; Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, 2008); Camilia Gómez Cotta, “Identidades y Políticas Culturales en Esmeraldas y Calo. Estudio de Casos Sobre Organizaciones Afro, Producción Cultural y Raza,” MA thesis, Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2006. 3 Echelman began working on woven sculptures when her paints and brushes did not arrive in ­India. Instead, Echelman studied and learned the craft of fish-net weaving that took her career in a marvelously unexpected direction. Janet Echelman, “Interview: Janet Echelman,” Surface Design Journal 37, no. 3 (2013): 14–19. 4 Grigore D. Pintilie, Peter Heppel, and Janet Echelman, “Interactive Design and Simulation of Net Sculptures,” In Taylor, R., Boulanger, P., Krüger, A., Olivier, P. (eds.), Smart Graphics (2010): 68–79. 5 Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, [2004] 2013), 84–85.

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Dialogical Episodes for Decolonizing (Art) History 6 Ibid., 87–89. 7 Ken Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 8 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). 9 Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985). For a more thorough discussion of Freire and Boal’s impact on “cultural agency” in Latin America see Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 10 Dialogical methods of creation are closely related to relational aesthetics developed in South America since the 1940s. For a discussion of Lygia Clark’s Mandala as a dialogical work see Ana María Reyes, “Incorporated Vision and the Critique of Desarrollismo: Marta Minujín, Beatriz González, and Lygia Clark,” Letral, University of Granada, no. 13 (2014): 100–112. http:// revistaseug.ugr.es/index.php/letral/issue/view/246 Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer has written extensively about how dialogical art is crucial to critical learning. Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas, 2007). Also see Bill Kelley Jr. and Grant H. Kester, eds. Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art, 1995–2010 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2017). 11 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Un Mundo Ch’ixi es Possible: Ensayos Desde un Presente en Crisis (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2018). 12 Daring to use the subjunctive, per Saidiya Hartman, this work could be a preamble to a process in Colombia, Motta’s, and my own native country. 13 https://wexarts.org/exhibitions/carlos-motta-your-monsters-our-idols. 14 On November 1, 2021, Motta and Zimmerman asked our panel: “What legal arguments and approaches can be implemented to change the name of the city of Columbus, Ohio? Is working within the limits of the law and existing legal structures productive to advance the rights of marginalized and immigrant communities? If so, can you think of potential forms of reparative justice that are informed by interpretive uses of the law? In what ways might there be legal strategies to achieve inclusive symbolic reparations.” November 1, 2021. The panelists included Kate Beane, Gina Dent, John Low, Chase Strangio, and myself. I was invited because of my work on symbolic reparations in the case Jineth Bedoya y otra v. Colombia that resulted in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights sentencing the Colombian State to create and finance a center “No Es Hora de Callar” as a form of symbolic reparations to journalist Jineth Bedoya and in honor of victims of sexual violence of the armed conflict. 15 The other two panels included Karma Chávez, Marcelos Hernández Castillo, Joseph M. Pierce, Martin Joseph Ponce, Susan Stryker, and Mabel O. Wilson on November 2, 2021; and Anna Akbar, Laura Barrera, Ambrose Dupree, Indigo Gonzales Miller, Saeed Jones, Twinkle Panda, and Mary E. Thomas on November 9, 2021. https://wexarts.org/exhibitions/ carlos-motta-your-monsters-our-idols. 16 Adolfo Achinte Albán, “¿Interculturalidad sin descolonialidad?” Achinte Albán critiques the “multiculturalism and inclusion” discourse of the Colombian Constitution, 1991, not having improved the material conditions of those marginalized since the Spanish invasion. 17 All quotes and references to the panel discussions come from Carlos Motta and Lucy I. Zimmerman, Carlos Motta, The Columbus Assembly, Julian Myers-Szupinska, Dan DiPiero, and Lucy I. Zimmerman eds., published on the occasion of the exhibition: Carlos Motta: Your Monsters, Our Idols (September 16–December 30, 2022), (Columbus, OH: The Wexner Center for the Arts, 2022), 21. 18 There are many adopting the Indigenous word “Abya Yala” instead of the “Americas”; see for instance, Fernando David Márquez Duarte and Víctor Alejandro Espinoza Valle, eds, Decolonizing Politics and Theories from the Abya Yala (Bristol: E-International Relations Press, 2022). 19 “Carlos Motta and Ana María Reyes in Conversation,” public talk on the occasion of the exhibition: Carlos Motta: Your Monsters, Our Idols, October 26, 2022, The Wexner Art Center, Columbus Ohio. https://wexarts.org/talks-more/carlos-motta-and-ana-maria-reyes-conversation 20 Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Language, trans. Charles Lambert (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). Cited in Kester Conversation Pieces, 106, 113, ft, 39 p. 214. 21 Kester, Conversation Pieces, 115.

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Ana María Reyes 22 I thank Doris Sommer for her insightful conversations on the Emmanuel Levinas and the d ­ angers of aiming for empathy. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (­Heidelberg: Springer Netherlands, 1979). 23 Kester, Conversation Pieces, 115. 24 Ibid., 114. 25 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 11. For an application of her critical fabulation methodology see Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & ­Company, 2019). 26 I use the term Afro-descendant instead of Black in this section to honor the linguistic self-­ representation of many social organizations that work with Liliana Angulo Cortés. While the artist ­expressed her solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement and the global fight against racism, she described the terms Negro/a to still serve the purpose of dehumanizing people in Colombia. Moreover, Afro-descendants do not identify as a monolithic group in Colombia. For instance, there are Anglo-Caribbean Raizales (i.e. San Andrés y Providencia) and Palequeros of the former maroon communities (i.e. San Basilio de Palenque). The vast majority of Afro-descendants who live in the cities do not have the same collective identities as the aforementioned communities but still experience severe racism. Historical retrieval of Afro historical struggles and contributions, and in this particular case during the Botanical Expedition in the late eighteenth century, requires a nuanced understanding of racial categories. At that time, Pardos (Afro-descendants of mixed race) occupied a higher social strata than Negros, who were entangled with the institution of slavery. As my dialogical method claims, it is important to listen and recognize the language of self-representation. Criollo in Spanish America is used primarily to describe descendants of Europeans born in the Americas, which have constituted an elite and governing group. 27 This is a version codified by the National Academy of History and disseminated by the education curricula. For more discussion on the selective memory of the National Academy of History see Ana María Reyes, “In Bed with Dead Bolívar: Beatriz González’s Case for Critical History Painting,” in Ana María Reyes and Maureen Shanahan eds., Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of an Icon (Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2016), 149–168. 28 Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (University of California Press, 1991). 29 With the help of paleographer María Mercedes Ladrón, Angulo posted digital copies of texts with their transcriptions that pertain to Afro-descendants. http://uncasodereparacion.altervista.org/ 30 In this chapter, I discuss the Madrid and Medellín installations. However, Un Caso de Reparación was exhibited at the Church/Cloister/Museum San Pedro Claver in Cartagena and has a permanent installation at the National Museum of Colombia in Bogotá. 31 For a discussion of the Expedición Mutisiana as a display of criollo pride see Alejandra Rojas Silva, “Flowers of the Colony, Seeds of Independence: The Illustrations of the Royal Botanical Expedition to Nueva Granada,” Selva A Journal of the History of Art 2 (Fall 2021): 135–156, https://selvajournal.org/article/flowers-of-the-colony-seeds-of-independence-the-illustrations-ofthe-royal-botanical-expedition-to-nueva-granada/. 32 Information pertaining to the Madrid installation of Un Caso de Reparación came from Liliana Angulo Cortés, “Un Caso de Reparación,” for the program Tras las huellas de la libertad, Museo Casa del Florero / Quinta de Bolivar, Bogotá, May, 20 2021. 33 Ibid. 34 Part of the installation includes a large format map locating the mines administered or owned by Manuel Mutis including Pamplona, Montuosa, Bucaramanga, and Rio de Oro. 35 Due to the wars of independence publications of the botanical paintings had to wait until the mid-­ twentieth century. Flora de la Real Expedición Botánica del Nuevo Reino de Granada: (1783–1816)/ promovida y dirigida por José Celestino Mutis; [Spanish-Colombian collaboration, Institutos de Cultura Hispánica and Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid] (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1954). 36 “Esta obra no hubiese sido posible sin los saberes de los pueblos indígenas y afrodescendientes, así como el trabajo forzado y el sacrificio de vidas humanas de las comunidades originarias que fueros esclavizadas por los Europeos en Abya Yala y Af-Rui-Ka.”

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Dialogical Episodes for Decolonizing (Art) History 37 For a detailed account of the anti-racist research-actions and collaborations between Liliana ­Angulo Cortés, the Museo de Antioquia, and several Afro-social movements in Medellín, see Carolina Chacón Bernal, “Museums, Ethno-Education, and Anti-Racism. The Exhibition ‘La Consentida es: La Familia Negra’ (The Favorite Is: The Black Family),” Intervención, 1, no. 23 (January–June 2021): 133–155. 38 According to the Colombian census, Antioquia is home to one of the largest Afro-descendant populations in the country. Chacón Bernal, “Museums, Ethno-education, and Anti-Racism,” 154. 39 For a history of the Museo de Antioquia see David Ramiro Herrera Castrillón, “El Sindróme de Valéry: Apuntes Sobre las Colecciones Fundacionales del Museo de Antioquia,” Revista Gráfia, 16 no. 1 (January-June 2019): 133–153. The foundational collections of MDA belonged to Manuel Uribe Ángel and Martín Gómez, two men who believed in the superiority of the Antioquian “race” and eugenic practices. See Chacón Bernal, “Museums, Ethno-education, and Anti-Racism,” 139–140. 40 Angulo Cortés, “Un Caso de Reparación.” Also Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2012). 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Ramón Grosfoguel, “Epistemic Extractivism: A Dialogue with Alberto Acosta, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,” in Knowledges Born in the Struggle: Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Maria Meneses eds. (New York: Routledge, 2019). 44 Angulo’s portrait was exhibited earlier in MDE07 and in MDA exhibition ¡Mandinga Sea! África en Antioquia, Luz Adriana Maya Restrepo and Raúl Cristancho Álvarez curators, Medellín, 2013. Her portraits can be found in the collection of the Banco de la República: https://www.­ banrepcultural.org/coleccion-de-arte/obra/proyecto-presencia-negra-ap4753. 45 Nicolás Vizcaíno Sánchez, “Remembering an Exhibition on Africa in Colombia, Some Kind of Sorcerers,” Contemporary & América Latina, Tue 26 February, 2019, https://amlatina.­ contemporaryand.com/editorial/mandinga-sea-africa-colombia/ 46 Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture in Colombia (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 47 See Nancy P. Appelbaum, Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-century Colombia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 48 See, for instance, Claudia Mosquera and Luiz Claudio, eds., Afro Reparaciones de la Esclavidtud y Justicia Reparativa Para Negros, Afrocolombianos, y Raizales (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2007); and María Angélica Suaza Español, “Archeology of Slavery in the P ­ rovince of Neiva. Colombia,” Current Perspectives on the Archaeology of African Slavery in Latin ­American, eds. Charles Orser y Pedro Paulo Funari (Berlin: Springer, 2015), 23–44. These efforts to affirm the presence of Afro-descendants in the Andean regions have material consequences for the implementation of the law 1448 of Law of Victims and Land Restitution, as well as the Decree 4635 for the collective reparations of Afro-descendants (2011). 49 Motta, Carlos et al. “Corpo Fechado – The Devil’s Work,” Carlos Motta et al., Carlos Motta: History’s Backrooms (Milan: SKIRA editore S.p.A., 2019), 206–209. 50 Motta has creatively interrogated the archive in many works, including The Nefandus Trilogy (2013), Corpus Fechado (The Devil’s Work), 2018 and his collaborative work with filmmaker Maya Mikdashi Deseos / ‫[ تابغر‬Desires] (2015). Ibid. 51 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts.” 52 Ibid., 11. 53 Ibid.

Selected Bibliography Albán Achinte, Adolfo. “¿Interculturalidad Sin Descolonialidad? Colonialidades Circulantes y ­Practices de Re-Existencia.” In Diversidad, Interculturalidad y Construcción de Ciudad, Wilmer Villa y Arturo Grueso Bonilla, eds., Bogotá: Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, 2008, pp. 64–96. Appelbaum, Nancy P. Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of ­Nineteenth-century Colombia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

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Ana María Reyes Bleichmar, Daniela. Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic ­Enlightenment. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride. N ­ ew York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985. Chacón Bernal, Carolina, “Museums, Ethno-education, and Anti-Racism. The Exhibition ‘La ­consentida es: La familia Negra.’” Intervención, 1, no. 23 (January – June 2021): 133–155. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Gómez Cotta, Camilia, “Identidades y Políticas Culturales en Esmeraldas y Calo. Estudio de Casos Sobre Organizaciones Afro, Producción Cultural y Raza.” MA thesis, Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2006. Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1–14. Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, [2004] 2013. Motta, Carlos et al. Carlos Motta: History’s Backrooms. Milan: Skira, 2020. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. Un mundo ch’ixi es Ensayos desde un presente en crisis. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2018. Sommer, Doris. The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014. Vizcaíno Sánchez, Nicolás. “Remembering an Exhibition on Africa in Colombia, Some Kind of Sorcerers.” Contemporary & América Latina, February, 26, 2019, https://amlatina.­contemporaryand. com/editorial/mandinga-sea-africa-colombia/. Wade, Peter. Blackness and Race Mixture in Colombia. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

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40 INNER SPACES The Depth Imagination Elizabeth DeLoughrey

What material and ontological spaces open up when we center the aesthetics of Black feminist embodiment? Moreover, how might embodied visual work by Caribbean women artists engage multiple fluid scales, from the level of the cell to the planetary and even cosmological? This chapter engages a postcolonial feminist approach to visual representations of embodied fluidity and flow in relation to the Caribbean and merges these discourses with the ontological turn to “wet matter” at a critical moment of sea-level rise in the Anthropocene. Astrida Neimanis has argued that “Water connects the human scale to other scales of life, both unfathomable and imperceptible. We are all bodies of water, in the constitutional, the genealogical, and the geographical sense.”1 This theorization of embodied water may be engaged in relation to the visual production of Black women artists, who until recently have been left out of the conversations around ecofeminism and the environmental humanities. My chapter brings together the work of Caribbean artists María Magdalena Campos-Pons (Cuba/US) and Deborah Jack (St Maarten/US) in relation to their visual allegories of oceanic embodiment, raising questions about how water is represented at the multiscalar levels of the ontological and cosmological. This chapter is part of a larger project to understand how Cold War logics and legacies rendered the planetary ocean as an “inner space” counter to an extraterritorial “outer space.” This is the legacy of underwater habitats built by the US military in the Caribbean as well as the ways in which the suboceanic world became accessible through visual media by figures such as Jacques Cousteau. These Cold War logics and sciences led to our carbon data for measuring climate change and the Anthropocene. My larger project is to rethink the ways in which these geopolitical claims to inner and outer space are complicated, localized, (re)figured, and embodied. Telescoping between the scales of climate change and weather, and between outer and inner space, the chapter explores the ways in which these artists render allegories of the Anthropocene as well as embodied sea ontologies emerging “in the wake” as Christina Sharpe would remind us, of Black Atlantic and other crossings.2 So let’s dive in. In recent years an oceanic imaginary has become apparent in scholarship and art that is responding to the threat of sea-level rise, adding a new dimension to how we might theorize our relationship to the largest space on earth, our planet ocean. For continental dwellers, 519

DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-46

Elizabeth DeLoughrey

the ocean has been imagined as external and even alien until, with the increase in extreme weather events, it floods your home. With glacial melt and ocean thermal expansion, our planetary future is becoming more oceanic. Sea-level rise may be one of our greatest visible signs of planetary change, connecting the activity of the earth’s poles with the rest of the terrestrial world, producing a new sense of planetary scale and perhaps even interconnectedness through the rising of a world ocean. So while the Anthropocene locates humans as geological agents, one might also trace out a discourse of oceanic agency that makes the constructed—and patently false—boundaries between the human and nature all the more porous and fluid.3 Over the span of her career, María Magdalena Campos-Pons has engaged the complexity, depth, volume, and embodiment of the oceanic realm, re-envisioning this space across multiple media.4 Since the 1990s, her large-scale Polaroid work in particular has repeatedly returned to a series of interrelated panels that map a grid of watercolors representing a bright, submarine blue that incorporates some human or humanoid form. The artist’s representations of the sea are compelling, intimate, and appealing. Her oceanic imaginary is often peopled, accessible, and while not realist, certainly suggests the volume and multidimensionality of the sea. These are not the dark, brooding, metallic seas of her fellow Cuban artist Yoan Capote, whose Isla canvases represent the thorny horizon of densely layered grey fishhooks, imagining the ocean in terms of its impenetrability for the Caribbean migrant. To Campos-Pons, the ocean is not the pure realm of “Nature,” as the binaries of Western thought would suggest. Nor is it a foe to be conquered. Her oceanic imaginary, rendered as medium and matter in watercolors, invokes a “wet ontology,” or sense of being created by and in water, most powerfully through color itself.5 Thus we might understand her work as embodying what the anthropologist Michael Taussig has called a “color vision” that is world-centered, where color “is not secondary to form” but is rather an animating, life-giving force that is critical to the experience of the work.6 The color blue in Campos-Pons’s photographic installations is associated with the orisha or spirit Yemayá. A Yoruba transplant to the Americas, Yemayá (also Yemoja, Imoja) is the mother of the orishas and an ocean spirit of maternal generosity. Associated with the crescent moon and seashells, she is the protector of fishermen.7 In Cuba, she’s also manifested as the Virgin Mary Our Lady of Regla, the patron saint of Havana Harbor. While Yemayá provides the critical form and color to the majority of Campos-Pons’s work, she is perhaps most visible in the panel Untitled (Breast and Bottle Feeding), from the series When I Am Not Here / Estoy Allá (1994) (Figure 40.1). This image represents a photograph of the artist’s upper torso painted in multiple hues of blue and purple, punctuated by white crescent waves. The artist holds towards the viewer an unvarnished wooden carved vessel, which presumably catches the milk hanging from two baby bottles that are worn around the neck and lie flat, partially filled, over the breasts. The photograph is striking for the color contrasts between the oceanic body and the lightness of the milk and vessel, as well as the prosthetic mammaries invoking the maternal generosity of Yemayá and her offerings. It also suggests her exploitation, since the bottles are weighted heavily by a plastic cord around the headless figure’s neck. In a statement the artist has written of her attempt to represent “the spaces that are constructed between dualities,”8 and in this sense the dualities here are thematic: the exploitation of Black women’s bodies in the plantation Americas as well as perhaps our own participation as spectators as we too drink from the aesthetic and spiritual milk of Yemayá. The vessel, we might say, is her craft. Like other Caribbean artists, Campos-Pons creates a visual pun on la mer(e), or 520

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Figure 40.1  María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Untitled (Breast and Bottle Feeding). From the series When I Am Not Here / Estoy Allá, 1994. Polaroid Polacolor Pro Photographs, 20 × 24 in. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College.

mar/madre, recuperating what Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite has written of in terms of the “submerged mothers” of African diasporic history.9 521

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Campos-Pons is contributing to a long conversation in the Caribbean about the oceanic imaginary in which the sea represents both origins and the future; a sacred space of the orishas and ancestors; the fluidity of identity; the maternal body; the terrors of the historic Middle Passage; and the more recent refugee experiences of balseros and botpippel. To Trinidadian scholar Carole Boyce Davies, “the Caribbean Sea is … a site of continuous change and the ongoing questioning of self, origin, direction.”10 To Brathwaite, Caribbean “unity is submarine,” a fluid regional imaginary that Martinican author Édouard Glissant has often reiterated.11 For Glissant the Caribbean is not insular, but rather is defined through rhizomatic “submarine roots … floating free, not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches.”12 This worldly if not cosmic viewpoint has been echoed by Cuban author Antonio Benítez-Rojo, who imagines the region consisting of “Peoples of the Sea [who are] traveling together toward the infinite.”13 This sense of grasping towards the infinite is represented in Campos-Pons’s repeated connection between the ocean (inner space) and the constellations (outer space). It is evident even in the titles of works such as Elevata (2002), Constellation (2004), and She Always Knew of the Space In-Between (2019). This interrelationship between cosmic and oceanic realms is represented figuratively as well as in the broad spectrum of blue and purple colors, creating a profoundly transformative “color sense,” to echo back to Taussig. In an interview with Myriam J. A. Chancy, Campos-Pons has suggested that, while her oceanic imaginary speaks to the material histories of diasporic subjects to the Caribbean (including her Chinese and European ancestors), her work is equally engaged in exploring what she calls “psychological space.”14 This representation of oceanic inner space is rendered by floating, liquid dreamscapes that emanate from the artist’s suspended head and hair, as in Elevata, and are evoked in titles such as Luminous Being (2019), Floating Between Temperature Zones (2019), and Blue Refuge (2009). For instance, in Nesting IV (2000) (Figure 40.2), a photograph of the artist’s head is divided vertically into two panels separated by two additional panels of blue watercolor. As with most if not all of her work, the panels are separated by white bars or frames, while horizontal brushstrokes or hair extensions move across the borders, visually stitching them together. The two blue panels of Nesting IV that occupy the interstitial headspace suggest the figure’s inner consciousness—this is represented by the baby-blue color on the

Figure 40.2  María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Nesting IV, 2000. Composition of four Polaroid ­Polacolor Pro photographs, each 24 × 20 in. Photo courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.

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left inner panel, and a more steel-colored blue on the right. The hair extension that crosses them could be a bar of energy or electricity, suggested by the antenna-like, beaded, and feathered point emerging from the figure’s scalp on the left. As with most of the artist’s selfrepresentations, her eyes are closed in a gesture of meditation, thought, or perhaps communication with and through this blue inner space, this blue ocean being. There are two readings I want to present here of what Taussig calls “the bodily unconscious” generated by the color blue, and what scholar Babatunde Lawal refers to in Yoruba contexts as one’s “spiritual” or “inner” head. In Yoruba cosmology, the potterycreator Obatala modelled the first human being out of clay which came to life with the divine breath of Olodumare. Subsequently, all humans are gifted with a physical head that represents the materiality of the body, but must choose an “inner head” that represents their destiny. The inner head “mediates between the individual and the orisha” (spirit); elaborate, artistic hairdressing is a veneration of one’s inner or spiritual head.15 As Lisa D. Freiman has suggested, this helps us understand the repetition of the disembodied head in Campos-Pons’s work, and the possibility that the long hair extensions that reach across boundaries emanate from the head of the artist/figure/Yemayá as a line or wavelength of communication, energy, and creativity. The ocean surrounds and submerges the human form in the installation just as we as viewers are often positioned below, in a submarine dreamscape. The dreamscape is expansive rather than two-dimensional due to the way in which the artist represents depth and volume by staging her works first as drawings, then sculptures, later photographing the watercolors of layered shades of blue as well as waves and whirls of blue paint, as in Elevata.16 So while these are meditative and often serene submarine-scapes, they represent the photographic capturing of a moment of stillness amidst subtle movement and change. Ultimately, we are invited to participate in that subtle meditation on blue being. The “bodily unconscious” represented here, the seascape of the “inner head” or space, is perhaps what could be called an “oceanic feeling,”17 but more properly should be understood as a state of becoming in an ocean of being. Through her invocation of the blues of Yemayá, Campos-Pons allows us to participate in the process. This blue ocean of being and becoming is open to the viewer, placing us as witnesses. These are not the dark, inaccessible depths of the ocean, but rather bright blue waters permeated by light. They invite one to dive in, to merge, to experience an ocean of spirit. The color blue has been associated with the animation of divine light, evident in the iconography of European representations of the Virgin Mary and her Cuban sister, Our Lady of Regla.18 The color blue—in the sky as well as the seas—is the manifestation of how the white light of the sun is diffracted; the long wavelengths of red and yellow are absorbed by water or particles, leading the short wavelengths of blue to render light visible in and of itself. In that sense both air and water can be understood as mediums more than distinct spaces.19 Yet light itself cannot be seen—it is only illuminated by color and objects. Thus Campos-Pons’s preferred media—watercolor and glass—capture light’s blue illumination and enable our participation in this vision of becoming. It is this tension between absence and presence, the seen and unseen, that underlines so much of Campos-Pons’s visual vocabulary. In an interview she has mentioned the vital influence of postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha’s concepts of interstitial space, the space between, which is evident in the very title of her series When I Am Not Here / Estoy Allá.20 “Estoy allá” can be translated as “I am there,” but it could also mean “out there,” in the beyond.21 This tension between absence and presence is a through-line in Campos-Pons’s 523

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work read materially in terms of diasporic identity, and in the linguistic tension in the title between English and Spanish. Yet, it should also be considered in ontological and psychological terms as a process of becoming. This is particularly evident in her most recent work, She Always Knew of the Space In-Between (2019), which uses a gouache method that thickens the watercolors, giving them a sense of tactility. She produced this work using a peacock feather, associated with the iridescent blues of Yemayá, deepening her usual palette of blues to incorporate more violet. In She Always Knew of the Space In-Between, the five-part panel is focalized by two figures resembling Dogon sculpture, who face each other in the center, perhaps framing that critical “space in-between.”22 The right figure is larger than the left, but they are lacking the sex characteristics (particularly breasts) that would definitively gender one or the other.23 Both have large, rounded shoulders, oblong torsos, triangular buttocks, and elongated, ­almost extra-terrestrial-looking heads. The alien-cosmological theme is repeated throughout the panels, including painted lines of blue and violet that cross the figures and repeat the patterns of concentric circles as well as exploding or expanding energy, like the big bang or destruction of a star. The theme of the ‘space in-between’ is evident in the figures and is interpersonal as well as cosmological. Read left to right, the panels seem to move from cosmological origins (the constellations and the ocean) to the figure of a generating mother in the second panel, whose luminous yellow, green, and blue figuration generates a series of blue and violet circles. These circles in turn give rise to a cardinal, perhaps even vaginal, mapping in which North, South, East, and West are marked in a circle above her, with an organic, vibrating blue oval shape in the center. The watercolors reiterate a long-held theme in Campos-Pons’s work of what Trinidadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip describes as “dis place.” Creator of works such as Chastity Belt (1984–1985) and Conception (1987), Campos-Pons has frequently invoked what Judy Chicago and other feminist artists have termed “vaginal iconography.”24 In fact, in resisting the label of abstract artist, Campos-Pons has argued, playfully I imagine, that her work is “simply a magnified representation of our sexual organs.”25 To Philip, writing on women of African descent in the (post)plantation Americas, “public space … must be read and interpreted from the point of view of the [safety of the] space between the legs.”26 Thus, the dichotomy of inner versus outer space is dismantled and gendered in relation to the legacies of colonial and racialized violence against Black women. Philip asks, “What is the language of the inner space?”27 Campos-Pons seems to provide us with multiple, creative, and complex answers. Certainly it is not linear, nor can it be easily located in Western models of time or space. It is oceanic, fluid, and in process. It seems to be more of a medium of transportation than a space. It is both the stillness of contemplation and generative becoming. It is maternal, but perhaps is conflicted about the relentless cycles of giving. It includes and even welcomes an audience in the process of initiation and transformation. It is blue ocean being and becoming.

Watery Bodies and Bodies of Water These questions of representing watery bodies and bodies of water in the Anthropocene are equally critical to the photographic and video installation work of Deborah Jack, whose visual iconography provides a multi-scalar lens for thinking through watery embodiment. There’s a simultaneity to time evident in the work of Campos-Pons in the way in which Yemayá is continually embodied as (African) past, Cuban or diasporic present, and an 524

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oceanic future. While both artists favor large visual installations—perhaps speaking to the tremendous scale of the oceanic—Jack’s imaginary foregrounds a brooding, greyscale, and agential ocean. Her work asks us to submerge into transoceanic history, imagery, sound, and to descend into the element of salt. As we know from Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott, “the sea is history,” monument, vault, and elemental force of erasure. In Jack’s oceanic imaginary, the sea is “heavy/ with bodies,” dissolving its human subjects and “a/salting” the Caribbean region as a hurricane force.28 While there is poetry in associating our evolutionary origins with the sea, Jack’s work brings this to tactile, micro-scalar and macro-scalar levels that are abstract yet fully embodied. And she reminds us, poignantly, of the human body’s constitution by salt. At the smallest scale, the human cell consists of water and salt in a shifting and dynamic relation of osmosis. In fact, two-thirds of the water in the human body is made up of this intracellular relationship, while the remaining third consists of blood, a carrier of corpuscles and water. Since life is thought to originate in the oceans, the salt of our cells is imagined as an evolutionary microcosm of the ocean in our blood, in what chemist Pierre Laszlo refers to as “cell consciousness.”29 As a Caribbean poet and artist, Jack has long engaged the representability of embodied fluidity and flow through poetry, still images, video, and sound. Eschewing the tropical blues of the tourist industry, Jack strips the color to greyscale and fragments the images to create an uncanny ocean. In the video series Drawn by Water (Sea) Drawings in (3) Acts, the ocean finds voice, but it’s not the expected rhythms we hear with human ears. This series of films focuses on waves crashing on the shore that do not prioritize human figuration. In that sense the (human) body is not the metaphor for ocean but rather the ocean becomes the metaphor for bodies. This is the inverse figuration to what we’ve seen in Campos-Pons, which is engaged with how human bodies embody and scale up to the immensity and sacrality of the oceanic. Drawn by Water stages a visual narrative of the ocean, beginning with Wait/Weight on the Water (Figure 40.3), calling attention to the temporality of fluidity as well as literal and symbolic volume of the ocean. This coastal, greyscale view of the ocean (filmed in both the Caribbean and the Netherlands) is punctured and punctuated by rectangular close-ups of the waves as well as square and rectangular blocks of color, primarily bright red. In this piece our vision becomes diffracted into rectangular segments that interrupt the assumed ebb and flow of what Brathwaite would refer to as “tidalectics.” To “wait” on the water is also to have an apprehension, perhaps of the way in which this body will rise to take other bodies. As the artist notes: Does water have memory? What is the tension when the water and the land connect, when different bodies of water connect and when bodies and water connect? How is this drawn on the water? What are the shared vulnerabilities of colonizer and the colonized when rising sea levels threaten the existence of both?30 Certainly in all of her work, which has turned repeatedly to the oceanic, to salt, and to sites of memory, we can see that to return to sites of trauma is to recognize that, in the artist’s words, “they’re also sites of healing. Those spaces live together … you have to return … (because) there is a spirit.”31 In her invocation of oceanic bodies, the artist has been inspired by Toni Morrison’s ­theory of “rememory,” where “memory is a sort of energy that travels right through time and space … water has a memory. So when there is a flood it’s not that the area gets flooded 525

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Figure 40.3  Deborah Jack: Drawn by Water, (Sea) drawings in (3) acts. Act one: Wait (weight on the water), (still) 2018.  Permission of the artist.

it’s that the water remembers where it used to go.”32 This is a through-line in nearly all of her work, evident in her narrative titles such as “the water between us remembers, so we wear this history on our skin, for a sea-bath and hope the salt will cure what ails us” (2018). This memory of water in and outside of human history is critical to understanding the way in which Jack represents the hurricanes that are simultaneously the mark of anthropogenic climate change as well as the rememory of the unburied souls who have perished in the crossing of both the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic. Pointing out that the hurricane derives its liquid fuel from saltwater which in turn rains down on the region, Jack provides a complex figuration of time and of the bod(ies) that circulate through the deep time of hydrological cycles. In Figure 40.4, you’ll notice that we have a juxtaposition of the shore-level view of the ocean as a contact zone at the beach, a space of transition and change, as well as the satellite view of a hurricane system, hundreds of miles wide. In this work we have a larger scale figuration of inner and outer space—juxtaposed in ways that allow for the nonontological, god’s eye view of the planet rendered possible by technologies developed through the Cold War, that is reconfigured, localized, and embodied as an “inner shore.” In some segments of the video Jack juxtaposes the satellite view of the hurricane with a bouquet of flamboyant blossoms held in the hand of a child. This highlights the multiscalar narratives of the Anthropocene as well as the critical need to place global technologies derived from militarism in relation to the embodied and racialized experience of the region. This represents a return to the memory and agency of water and of watery bodies which calls for experiments with form and representation. In the words of NourbeSe Philip “To read the text that lies ‘missing’ in the silence of the inner space, we need a new language.” In fact, this new language may not necessarily be human derived. In much of her recent video installations Jack has incorporated the Rossby Whistle, a sound created by the westward movement of currents from the Atlantic across the Caribbean basin and their movement 526

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Figure 40.4  Deborah Jack: … our states of emergence see us looking for an inner shore to meet the coming surge and then…, 2017, Single-channel digital video. Permission of the artist.

back over the course of 120 days. First observed by scientists in 2016, the Caribbean is emitting a hum that can’t be heard by human ears—only outer space satellites. In these videos, particularly in Drawn by Water, the viewer witnesses a bird’s-eye view of the rhythm of coastal waves and hears the dissonance of the augmented sound of the Rossby Whistle. To Jack, this is the sound of the violent ecological and colonial history of the region, the submarine connection between the islands (“the unity is submarine” as we know from Brathwaite) as well as the dissonance of the human relation to nonhuman nature. It is also, to her ears, “like a heartbeat,” connecting the inner space of the human and earthly body in ways that cannot be measured except through that telescoping to a planetary outer space. To quote from her “waterpoem 5” there is a sea inside me sprawling wide … unplumbed depths the embrace of oceans is the love i know new currents chilled by the melting of icecaps […] there is a sea inside me witness to countless crimes i carry evidence in my belly Witness a flotilla of bodies bleached bloated blurred pixilated adrift in history still seeking remembrance33 527

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The challenge of representing watery bodies and bodies of water in the Anthropocene is critical to the poetry, photographic and video installation work of Jack, whose visual iconography provides a multiscalar lens for thinking through watery embodiment. In fact, This embodiment is rendered at the cellular level, which we glean from her poetic titles such as “The salt in our blood, the salt in the sea, the sea in our blood #2” (2021) and “the salt of their blood, still in the ocean, the sea kissing our shores—every wave is a hymn, every tide a poem. The sea is an elegy” (2021). Although these pieces refer to the way in which our evolutionary origins come from the sea, the images themselves place organic natural forms that are circumscribed by rectilinear and technological shapes, calling attention to the very construct of a natural oceanic imaginary and the ways in which we continue to rely on satellite technologies to imagine—and even to hear—our oceanic relationships. Moreover, the photographs are overlaid with salt crystals and gold leaf, a testimony to the European commodification of the minerals of the Caribbean in an early modern context in which salt made transatlantic colonialism possible through the preservation of food, an element that used to be more valuable than gold.34 Centering the aesthetics of Black feminist embodiment is a decolonial strategy; it insists on an engagement with embodiment, history, (re)memory and more-than-human being. Campos-Pons and Jack’s work reminds us, in the words of Neimanis which we began with, that “Water connects the human scale to other scales of life, both unfathomable and imperceptible.” The unfathomable in these artists’ works is rendered alternately as the sacred, as a depth imagination of transatlantic history, as well as the uncanny. This is an engagement with watery bodies and bodies of water as decolonial alternative to the fixed mappings of colonial cartography and disembodied history, including their militarized satellite legacies. These works provide us with aesthetic practices of ocean being and becoming, and the ways in which our bodies are continually “drawn by water,” in a critical moment of sea-level rise in the Anthropocene.

Notes 1 Astrida Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water,” Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice, ed. Henriette Gunkel et al. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 85–99. 2 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2016). 3 This is an argument drawn from Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 4 Tatiana Flores, “Sea and Self,” in María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Sea and Self, exh. cat. (Milwaukee: Haggerty Museum, 2021), 7–17. 5 Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters, “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume Through Oceanic Thinking,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33, no. 2 (March 2015): 247–264. https://doi.org/10.1068/d14148p. 6 Michael Taussig, “What Color Is the Sacred?” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (Autumn 2006): 28–51. https://doi.org/10.1086/509745. 7 Solimar Otero and Toyin Falola, eds., Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in the Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013). 8 Quoted in Lisa D. Freiman, ed., María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything Is Separated by Water (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 52. 9 This maternal ocean is discussed at length in Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Tatiana Flores, “­Submerged Bodies: The Tidalectics of Representability and the Sea in Caribbean Art,” Environmental Humanities 12, no. 1 (2020): 132–166; Kamau Brathwaite, ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey (New York: We Press, 1999). See also Brathwaite, “Submerged Mothers,” Jamaica Journal 9, nos. 2–3 (1975): 48–49.

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Inner Spaces: The Depth Imagination 10 Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (New York: Routledge, 1994), 13. 11 Kamau Brathwaite, Caribbean Man in Space and Time: A Bibliographical and Conceptual Approach (Kingston: Savacou, 1974), 1–11. 12 He continues, “the abyss is a tautology: the entire ocean, the entire sea gently collapsing in the end into the pleasures of sand, make one vast beginning, but a beginning whose time is marked by these balls and chains gone green.” Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 6. 13 Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 16. To Benítez-Rojo, “the culture of the Caribbean … is not terrestrial but aquatic … [it] is the natural and indispensable realm of marine currents, of waves, of folds and double folds, of fluidity and sinuosity” (11). 14 Myriam J. A. Chancy, “Recovering Origins: An Interview with María Magdalena Campos-Pons,” in From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic (­Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), 210. 15 Babatunde Lawal, “From Africa to the Americas: Art in Yoruba Religion,” in Arturo Lindsay, ed., Santería Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Art (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 19. See also Babatunde Lawal, “Orilonese: The Hermeneutics of the Head and Hairstyles Among the Yoruba,” in Hair in African Art and Culture, ed. Roy Sieber and Frank Herreman (New York: Museum for African Art, 2000), 93–109. See also discussion of this in Freiman, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, 52. 16 See Freiman, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, 52, on process of creating them as sculptural 3D objects. 17 The term is from French author Romain Rolland; Freud famously dismissed the concept of “une sentiment oceánique” and defined it as a regressive narcissism associated with the child’s boundarylessness with the mother—a fluidity between egos and bodies that did not fit in the progressive model of psychoanalytic individualism. Rolland was pursuing a mystical line of thought between West and East, from Baruch Spinoza to Sri Ramakrishna, about a state of being that was not linear or regressive but outside of time itself in an “ocean of spirit.” See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1962); Ayon Maharaj, “The Challenge of the Oceanic Feeling: Romain Rolland’s Mystical Critique of Psychoanalysis and His Call for a ‘New Science of the Mind’,” History of European Ideas 43, no. 5 (August 2017): 474–498. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2017.1356741; William B. Parsons, “The Oceanic Feeling Revisited,” The Journal of Religion 78, no. 4 (October 1998): 501–523. https://doi.org/10.1086/490288. 18 Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 19 See James Jerome Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 20 Lynne Bell, “History of People Who Were Not Heroes: A Conversation with Maria Magdalena ­Campos‐Pons,” Third Text 12, no. 43 (1998): 33–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528829808576732. 21 Homi K. Bhabha, “Beyond the Pale: Art in the Age of Multicultural Translation,” in B ­ iennial ­Exhibition, ed. Elisabeth Sussman, Thelma Golden, John G. Hanhardt and Lisa Phillips (­New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993), 62–73. 22 Many thanks to art historian Judith Bettelheim for her help with the iconography of the figures. 23 Campos-Pons has positioned Yemayá and Oshun facing each other in her photographs, so while it’s tempting to identify the larger figure as male and the smaller as female, there is some ambiguity. 24 See Freiman, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, 17–23. 25 Ibid., 60. 26 M. NourbeSe Philip, “Dis Place—The Space Between,” in A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays (Toronto: Mercury Press, 1997), 76. 27 Ibid., 98. 28 See her catalogue, Deborah Jack: 20 Years (New York: Pen + Brush, 2022). 29 Pierre Laszlo, Salt: Grain of Life, trans. Mary Beth Mader (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 91. 30 Deborah Jack, Artist Statement. 31 Deborah Jack, Artist Statement.

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Elizabeth DeLoughrey 32 See Oceans of Knowing (podcast). A conversation with Deborah Jack and Elizabeth De Loughrey and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, 4th Space, Concordia University, Montreal, February 2021. This podcast can be linked here: https://soundcloud.com/seascapepoetics/episode-3oceans-of-knowing-the-ocean-as-a-space-of-origin-destiny/reposts 33 Drisana Deborah Jack, Skin (St Martin: House of Nehesi Publishers, 2006). 34 For more on Jack’s figuration of salt, see C. C. McKee “a salting of sorts”: “Salt, Sea, and Affective Form in the Work of Deborah Jack,” Art Journal, 78, no. 2 (2019): 14–27. https://doi.org/10.1080 /00043249.2019.1626155.

Selected Bibliography Bell, Lynne. “History of People Who Were Not Heroes: A Conversation with Maria Magdalena ­Campos-Pons,” Third Text 12, no. 43 (1998): 33–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528829808576732. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. ­Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Bhabha, Homi K. Biennial Exhibition: Beyond the Pale: Art in the Age of Multicultural Translation. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993. Brathwaite, Kamau. Caribbean Man in Space and Time: A Bibliographical and Conceptual Approach. Kingston: Savacou, 1974. Chancy, Myriam J. A. From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. Davies, Carole Boyce. Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. New York: Routledge, 1994. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and Tatiana Flores, “Submerged Bodies: The Tidalectics of Representability and the Sea in Caribbean Art.” Environmental Humanities 12, no. 1 (2020): 132–166. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). Flores Tatiana, “Sea and Self,” in María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Sea and Self, exh. cat. (­ Milwaukee: Haggerty Museum, 2021), 7–17. Freiman, Lisa D., ed. María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything Is Separated by Water. Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Gibson, James Jerome. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Jack, Drisana Deborah, Skin (St Martin: House of Nehesi Publishers, 2006). Laszlo, Pierre. Salt: Grain of Life. Trans. Mary Beth Mader. New York: Colombia University Press, 2001. Lawal, Babatunde. “From Africa to the Americas: Art in Yoruba Religion.” In Santería Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Art. Edited by Arturo Lindsay. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996, 2–37. Neimanis, Astrida. “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water.” In Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice. Ed. Henriette Gunkel et al. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. Otero, Solimar and Toyin Falola, eds., Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in the Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013). Pastoureau, Michel, Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Philip, M. NourbeSe. “Dis Place—The Space Between.” In A Genealogy of Resistance and Other ­Essays. Toronto: Mercury Press, 1997. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2016). Steinberg, Philip and Kimberley Peters. “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume Through Oceanic Thinking.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33, no. 2 (2015): 247–264. https://doi.org/10.1068/d14148p. Taussig, Michael. “What Color Is the Sacred?” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (2006): 28–51. https://doi.org/10.1086/509745.

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41 MARIA AUXILIADORA DA SILVA Nossa Mãe Maria of Terreiro Life and Faith on Black Grounds Genevieve Hyacinthe

Terreiro as Self-liberation The late Black artist Maria Auxiliadora da Silva (Campo Belo, State of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1935–1974, São Paulo) created a series of terreiro paintings featuring Mãe Maria’s (Blessed Mother’s) flowers. Terreiro is a liminal space of refuge characterized by the Black Brazilian concept and dynamic of quilombismo, a form of Black Atlantic fugitivity. Inspired by the reflections of contemporary artist and healer Star Catherine Feliz, I posit that in terreiro spaces like Auxiliadora’s paintings, the fugitive is empowered to reunite with themselves and their purpose, their true home.1 Star Catherine Feliz finds spiritual and ancestral support not only in their connection with human kindred but with their faith in plant life. In their words: Plant medicine … This is the arc of my story. These are all the points that led me back home to me and back home to my purpose … Plants and spirits and ancestors were always a really strong presence in my life … The soul’s purpose is a part of yourself that is hidden and that maybe society or the world around you does not see or recognize the value in, but this is who we are, and this is what we came here to do.2 In this way, terreiro spaces where floral and botanical presence is divine energy, like those painted by Auxiliadora or created across media two generations later by Star Catherine Feliz, are resonant with the theme of this section, “Living and Loving”: They reflect a spirit of decoloniality that, as the Black Brazilian feminist scholars, Luciane Ramos Silva, Tanya Saunders, and Sarah Ohmer assert, move Black Atlantic folks from “collective solidão, that we as African-descendant people, have experienced since our dispersion … [to] spaces that focus on life and livingness.”3 These spaces counter Eurocentric frames that write off Black “feeling, Black love, hope and Black imaginings of utopian futures” on earth and in the afterlife.4 Collective solidão recognizes the violent separation of individuals from their families, communities, cultures, and kingdoms as a mechanism of the Black Atlantic trade of enslaved people. A new sense of decoloniality emergent from it focuses on “life and livingness” and, in so doing, gives rise to new solidarities in the Black Americas and 531

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Caribbean—some recuperated or informed by a sense or trace of Africa. As Silva, Saunders, and Ohmer suggest, these new solidarities are designed through Black Atlantic frameworks intersected with feminist, feminine, and womanhood perspectives that are inclusive of, yet expansive beyond, the traumas of Atlantic crossing, while embracing love, hope, heterogeneity, and agency.5 African Diaspora scholar Michelle Wright’s sense of intersecting spacetimes informs the arc of my musing that Black Atlantic time does not move linearly; rather, it is perceived through the now as “one spacetime: the moment of now through which we imagine the past and move into future possibilities.”6 In this way, diaspora as a spacetime of the now is liminal and contingent rather than fixed. The resonances and contours of its histories, narratives, imagined experiences and navigations are framed through one’s present cultural or corporeal position and concomitant envisioning. Without a mono-authoritative mooring or compass, both time and perspective are perpetually mutable. Thus, I imagine Star Catherine Feliz as an interlocutor who, to some extent, channels what Auxiliadora could not express in her own time.7 Auxiliadora’s terreiro paintings are critical insights into Star Catherine’s liberatory Black Atlantic ideas and works. Terreiro is a realm of Black Atlantic autonomy that, while liminal, precarious, and irresolute, is a utopic space of freedom and sanctuary. Using her innovative formal approach, including the rendering of flowers as symbolic agents, Auxiliadora establishes these Black terriero grounds within several of her paintings. Terreiro is considered African earth because Brazil was the last country in the Americas to end African enslavement in 1888. Auxiliadora grew up in São Paulo rather than Salvador, a hub for descendants of enslaved people in Brazil. Still, she certainly felt an African influence because her grandparents were brought from Africa to Brazil.8 Moreover, as Luciane Ramos Silva notes, Black Brazilians of São Paulo have “a long history of migration and an expressive and unsuspected … presence”; they have been integral to life there as agents of social justice and radical creativity.9 Immersed in this São Paulo milieu, Auxiliadora’s work depicted Black Brazilian everyday life, one that was infused with African-based spiritual practices and cosmologies, including “capoeira, samba, Umbanda, candomblé [and] Orixás.”10 Terreiro is integral to the Candomblé devotional complex; while the term generally translates as “garden or area,” simultaneously, it means a Candomblé ceremonial site or “ritual house.”11 The late Black Brazilian feminist scholar, Beatriz Nascimento, wrote that terreiro, like “Black dance parties (baile Blacks) … and favelas are contemporary quilombos that embody Black politics of fugitivity.”12 As such, they share qualities with other Black Atlantic havens of enslavement and fugitivity, including “the cimarrones of Panama and Peru, the palenques of Cuba, and the maroon [communities] of Jamaica … established [to reflect the] … pattern and practice of flight or fight in response to the injustices of slavery.”13 Placing the focus on Brazil, Anthropology and African Diaspora scholar, Christen Smith, refers to the various spaces, actions, and concepts comprising a quilombismo worldview and lived experience that encompasses terreiro: as ephemeral as a periodic escape for a few days away from the city and down the road from plantations … In this interpretation, we can think of quilombos not just as independent societies of resistance but also as resting places or espaços de Fuga, where Black people could retreat to seek religious renewal (particularly through the practice of candomblé), commune with friends and family, or pause.14 532

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Yet, we might consider that art forms depicting Black ritual life were among the few widely “approved” images of Black Brazilian-ness at the time, despite the nation’s repressive state. These representations were viewed by the white power structure as exotic, nonthreatening depictions, particularly concerning the burgeoning global Pan-African Black Power movement of the time. Relatedly, historian Thomas Skidmore argues that while artworks that could be perceived as in the Black folk vernacular tradition were “undoubtedly important and valuable, the study and preservation of Afro-Brazilian beliefs and customs have been politically very safe. It fits perfectly with the elite view that Brazil’s historical links to Africa are now essentially quaint.”15 Terreiro is simultaneously a realm of individual and collective beingness where it may be possible to develop a self-directed means to heal the assault upon Black beingness.16 The quilombismo dynamic that underlies terreiro suffuses it with liminality and precariousness in all its forms.17 Terreiro fugitivity manifests in Black Atlantic art media in action, idea, and material form. All these modes contain liminality, precarity, and irresolution and come into life according to the measure of the individual or collective as “the unfinished project of emancipation … [which includes] the sense and awareness … [of] the precarity of the afterlives of slavery.”18 Terreiro is a space where, as Sharpe asserts of the wake, we take on “a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives. With that analytic, we might imagine otherwise from what we know now in the wake of slavery.”19 I envision Auxiliadora’s paintings as terreiro grounds of the Black Atlantic, feminine earth. Through her ingenious painting approach, she nurtures this metaphorical earth from seed to flower to provide sanctuary for her or “our known and un/imaginable lives.”20

Catholic Encoding and Formal Innovation in Terreiro Miracles Auxiliadora situates Catholic signs, like Mãe Maria, in her painted terreiro spaces with friction that points to the religion’s origins in Brazil as a European faith system that strengthened the will of the colonizers and enslaved alike. Catholicism provides sanctuary, vigor, and autonomy for the Black progeny of the enslaved while also subjugating them. I explore how she accomplishes this in three paintings: Terreiro de Candomblé (1970), Autorretrato com Anjos/Self-Portrait with Angels (1972), and Velório da Noiva/The Bride’s Wake (1974). The first, Terreiro de Candomblé (see Figure 41.1), suggests a faint Catholic presence within an otherwise spiritual scene of “Afro-centricity” by establishing a hierarchy through the figures’ arrangement in space, gestures, and symbolic omissions.21 Here, Candomblé’s rich aesthetics and gestures are part of a spirited syncretic display in a manner that expresses connections to imagined African roots, a particularly critical concern within Black Brazilian art and intellectual circles at the time.22 In it, a group of black Brazilian devotees appears amid an active ritual, entranced by the miracle occurring in the center of the scene. The faithful onlookers form a roda, or circle, around the central ritual act as they dance, kneel, and pray to the accompaniment of drums. The upper field of the scene is dedicated to the deities and ancestors. From left to right, Auxiliadora presents the following: a horse and rider, likely symbolizing the hunter Orixá, Oxóssi, whose appearance at a Candomblé ceremony indicates the attainment of the trance state associated with roda;23 Yemanjá, the Orixá of the oceans and comeliness; Mami Wata, the siren of Black Atlantic crossing; above her, perhaps an Indigenous Guarani Xondaro master from the lands that came to be known to as São Paulo state, wearing a feathered crown and priming a bow and arrow. 533

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Figure 41.1 Maria Auxiliadora da Silva, Terreiro de Candomblé, 1970. Oil and polyester paste on canvas, 23.6 × 31.5 in. (60 × 80 cm). Coleção de Ivonaldo Veloso de Melo, São Paulo.

Auxiliadora is an extraordinary visual storyteller of Black Brazilian life, and we see this ability in Terreiro de Candomblé. Scholars have emphasized that Black Brazilian ritual practices commonly took place in a concealed area by necessity.24 Brazilian curator Marta Mestre suggests Black artists painted this way as a provocative move to respond to the military dictatorship with images that might be received as presenting Black Brazilians and their African aesthetics and traditions as empowering. Mestre attests, “The cheerful colors and emotive visuality of her lost Eden veil the symbols of personal and collective resistance.”25 Black ritual life depictions were among the few widely “approved” images of Black Brazilian-ness at the time that were viewed by the White power structure as exotic, and nonthreatening, particularly when viewed against the burgeoning global pan-African Black Power movement visual culture of the time. Relatedly, Thomas Skidmore argues that while artworks that could be perceived as in the Black folk vernacular tradition were “undoubtedly important and valuable, the study and preservation of Afro-Brazilian beliefs and customs have been politically very safe. It fits perfectly with the elite view that Brazil’s historical links to Africa are now essentially quaint.”26 Auxiliadora’s Terreiro de Candomblé may suit the aesthetic tastes of both sides of the public spectrum because it elicits a liberatory “Black is Beautiful” sentiment and the hegemonic “Black is simple” simultaneously. Its terreiro spirit emerges from the tension of the scene’s Black Atlantic fugitivity and concomitant precarity, which the viewer perceives in the simultaneous subtlety with which Auxiliadora evokes Catholicism, Black Brazilian 534

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Orixá cosmologies, and Indigenous signifiers in her image of spiritual syncretism. We see, for instance, that Auxiliadora has painted the Guarani Xondaro master so that his bow and arrow are poised in the direction of the Catholic, St. Sebastian. Moreover, the spirit of Black Atlantic womanhood is overwhelmingly represented by Africanized deities associated with West African and Black Atlantic motherly protection, each with both common traits across the Diaspora and also with the cultural specificity and variation contingent upon where each is worshipped: Nanã Buruku (the Candomblé mother of the universe and creation associated with earth), Yemanjá and Mami Wata (both mothers of the sea and the Black Atlantic crossing of the enslaved often said to have mermaid-like qualities—the former associated with the creation of the Orixá pantheon of deities, the latter a syncretic form with attributes from Hinduism, Islam, and West African religions from Nigeria to Togo and Dahomey).27 Auxiliadora also references Black Atlantic womanhood by evoking the Catholic Blessed Mother, Mãe Maria, widely believed to be syncretized with these Africanized feminine divinities, whose presence is signified by the rosary Nanã holds in her hands. Thus, in Terreiro de Candomblé, Auxiliadora renders a scene of Black Brazilian devotion where the dynamism, autonomy, and precarity of quilombismo are triggered, in part, by the strained position of Catholicism. Here, and in other paintings like it, she activates these sensibilities through her ingenious process of breaking—or, more accurately, “layering” new formal ground—by undergirding her painted terreiro spaces with thick black paint. Thinking through her development helps us understand more how she developed this unique approach. Painting on various supports made of paper, canvas, or plywood, Auxiliadora applied plastics, gouache, and acrylic and oil paint, interspersed with passages of raised-relief made from mixtures including polyester resins, acrylic putty, and the industrial-grade household glue, Wanda paste. In addition, she collaged her hair into the compositions as well as strands and clusters from others to insert a Black Brazilian presence.28 As Auxiliadora recalled in a 1972 interview: My first oil paintings, from 1968, were flat, without reliefs. There were no reliefs at the beginning of 1968, but by the end of 1968, I started to make reliefs with hair. At first, I used the oil paint itself to affix it because, at the time, I still wasn’t familiar with Wanda putty. I would get thick oil paint and implant the hair directly in the paint. I would use natural hair, frequently my own, since I often paint creoles. […] I was painting a large canvas of a candomblé scene.29 Marta Mestre asks what we might learn from looking closely at both Auxiliadora’s subject matter and novel method for their avant-garde formal inventiveness and sociopolitical critique. She suggests Auxiliadora’s painting reflects how marginalized artists of the Global South formally draw upon popular or craft aesthetics to make their creative presence visible on their terms.30 Auxiliadora literalizes terreiro’s black grounds as the black fields of her picture planes. In many works, she creates a black monochromatic underpainting of some kind by covering the support with layers of black pigment before rendering the figures and setting. She occludes the black partially or entirely from direct view with layers and strokes of polychromatic pigment and collage elements.31 We observe Auxiliadora’s establishment of black fields as a means of setting terreiro ground as a foundation within which Mãe Maria’s flowers bloom in several works, including A Colheita do Cactus/The Harvest of Cactus, n.d.; 535

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Colheita/Harvest, 1973; Colheita de Flores/Flower Harvest, n.d.; Refeição/Meal, 1970; and Flores no campo/Flowers in the field, 1974, among others.32 Marigolds are native to “the subtropical regions” of the Americas, from the Southwest United States through Latin America and the Caribbean, including the Brazilian forests. Portuguese explorers were said to have “discovered” them in the sixteenth century. Marigolds may be the ultimate Black Brazilian terreiro flowers because of their history as signifiers of the Catholic Mãe Maria and simultaneous entanglement with quilombismo’s freedom and precarity due to their connection to Portuguese enslavers.33 At the same time, they were thought to foster cosmic connections, bring good luck, and protect the devout from evil.34 Marigolds frequently appeared as ornamentation on Mãe Maria’s vestments, marigold garlands were made for her celebration days, and it is believed they “represent the golden rays of glory” visible around her head or decorating her throne in religious renderings.35 The striking way Auxiliadora lays the marigolds on the heavy terreiro black ground transforms their presence from a pleasurable everyday scene of cooperative agrarian work to one of plant and human collaboration in establishing divine revelry within the mundane. We are looking at a Black Brazilian space of freedom; if not, as others have noted, “subversion” intensified through the friction and liberty of quilombo.36 Perhaps Auxiliadora obscures Mãe Maria so she may feel as free as her devotees to rejoice in a field of Mãe’s sunshine-hued flowers.

Loving Collaboration and Protection in Terreiro Time Auxiliadora is one of Brazil’s most celebrated painters, and her terreiro works embrace, rather than prohibit, aesthetic and philosophical resonances and entanglements across eras, thus creating spaces for their intermingling. A closer look at how she situates black ground and flowers as a means of encoding Mãe Maria’s Catholic presence within her paintings adds a productive tension to the spaces of fugitivity she creates. As in Michelle Wright’s sense of intersecting spacetimes within the Black Atlantic, which embraces nonlinear time, it does not seek authentication from unified narratives, as they do not exist. Freedom, radicality, bravery, and innovation are terms we can associate with terreiro spaces like Star Catherine Feliz’s plant kin healing actions and performances and Auxiliadora’s paintings. Although Star Catherine is nonbinary, and it may be difficult to speculate how Auxiliadora may have self-identified, by considering them as kindreds, I arrive at the sense that I am beholding a form of feminine agency and grace. Their work enacts Christen Smith’s charge to highlight Black Atlantic women’s autonomy and genius for “radically diversi[fying]… [Latin American theoretical] discourses … to foreground Black women’s contributions in Latin America to philosophical and political thought [and art praxis] in the Americas.”37 Star Catherine Feliz’s Botanica Cimarrón, her online botanica dedicated to providing herbal tinctures and flower essences, is a means of giving “earth healing back to the people,”38 and their performance, Mensaje para escribiente/Message for the Scribe, from 2016, are terreiro art and praxis. Both are Black Atlantic offerings for restoring a sense of individual and collective wholeness and a journey back to self.39 As in Auxiliadora’s paintings, Catholicism contributes to the precarious nature of this journey because of its violent origins as the belief system of the colonizers, whose repercussions are extant in the Caribbean and Latin America today. 536

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We learn from Star Catherine Feliz that through her interactions with plant kin, she is empowered to transform their feeling of singular creation into a state of faith and generative collaboration. As Fred Moten might suggest, in this way, they are “consenting to not being a single being” because of her faith in the “flowers that come up through our bones to work steel,” as Black Atlantic endurance affirmed.40 Her own and collective sense of Black Atlantic endurance and flourishing is suggested in her performance, Mensaje para escribiente, in which she appears on her white computer screen, apparently alone. However, it is ornamented by an abstract, flotsam-like accumulation with a gold patina, copresented with video, JPEG, and folder file icons.41 Following African Diaspora and Black Feminist scholar, Abena Busia, among others, I use the descriptor “flotsam” as an intentional allusion to the lost lives at sea of the enslaved of the Black Atlantic, what Busia describes as “the flotsam and jetsam of … the traumatic moments” of human exchange and its ongoing aftermaths.42 We understand that Star Catherine Feliz is accompanied by grace despite the asceticism of her composition. In the performance, we view a relaxed, grounded Star Catherine Feliz framed within a small square, just a bit larger than a thumbnail photo. She recites lines from the s­ eventeenthto eighteenth-century Ghanian Catholic nun Teresa Chikaba’s hagiography Compendio de la Vida ejemplar de la venerable Madre (1752) and George Bernard Shaw’s The Black Girl in Search of God (1932) with a calm and humble familiarity exhibited by the Black Atlantic Catholic faithful.43 The scholarship on George Bernard Shaw does not reveal the playwright had any legitimate abolitionist leanings. Instead, his white imperial mentality emerges in his writing as a simplistic message of “intermarriage” as the pathway to the Black Girl’s salvation.44 Gifted with the ability to transmute violence into grace, Star Catherine Feliz speaks verses from voices that, to varying degrees, originate in the subjugation of Black women with the cadence of soft prayer. The feeling of tenderness she has established in her action is kindled further by another, larger square she includes in the action’s composition, which depicts brown skin that is her own in a scene of bathing reminiscent of baptism and renewal.45 The Mensaje para escribiente space of intense intimacy is created out of the need for concealment and protection. Similarly, Auxiliadora’s plant kin is mechanisms of self-care that provide her with the love and support she needs to carry on with her creative work. Her flowers—her most constant plant kin rendered as symbols of Mãe Maria—are central to her work’s terrestrial and sacred intersections. They are among the “pure things [that] com[e] … out of herself.”46 Their flourishing represents her own, which is a perspective supported by Tobi Meier’s view of her paintings of daily life as respites from “the industrialization and rapid urbanization of São Paulo,” where the artist “frequently depicts the symbioses between humans, plants, and animals in the periphery of the city.”47 As anthropologist Theresa Miller asserts, “resilience is a multispecied endeavor.”48 Some chronicle that Auxiliadora experienced many vulnerabilities in her life, leading her into an isolated creative existence: She was required to curtail her formal education at an early age to care for many of her 18 siblings. As mentioned above, Auxiliadora’s grandparents were among the enslaved transported from West Africa to Brazil, and her parents were menial workers, though they had artistic skills.49 Moreover, many members of Auxiliadora’s immediate family were artists, though critics suggest gender biases may have eroded what could have been a rousingly supportive environment. As Pollyanna Quintella argues, “The entire history of the artist … is in constant flux between approval and rejection. 537

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Even concerning her family, Auxiliadora insisted on showing a certain distance about her brothers.”50 During the height of her career, roughly from 1968 to her premature passing from cancer in 1974, the artist painted in solitude with tireless dedication in her studio or outside in her surroundings.51 Those close to her remarked that she would talk to her paintings and herself for hours as part of her process.52 Auxiliadora’s paintings pay homage to her mother, Mãe Maria, through the terreiro and floral treatments in many of her works. I wonder how she might have referred to herself during these conversations. Perhaps her utterances of “Maria” were misunderstood as a self-address rather than a supplication for inspiration and assurance. In light of this, I speculate that in instances in which her immediate family was not a source of consistent creative affirmation or protection, Mãe Maria was, and it can be registered in her work. For example, the marginalization she faced as an artist may have contributed to her predilection for working in solitude. This devotion underlies ­Auxiliadora’s Autorretrato com Anjos/Self-Portrait with Angels of 1972 (see Figure 41.2), the second painting I am analyzing here. This late self-portrait is a painting in which we see Auxiliadora in her studio, either in heaven or on earth. Within the rectangularly oriented composition, she represents herself encircled by four angels, each flying into the painting from one of the four corners. Mãe Maria is evoked by a field of heavy impasto composed of variations of Marian blues, white brushstrokes, and a floral garland rendered in elegant relief that encircles her levitating as if propelled by the angels’ heavenly pull.53 We see these flowers commonly referenced in Mãe Maria devotional paintings throughout history, such as in the medieval German Madonna of the Rose Bower (1440–1442) by German painter Stefan Lochner, in which red roses and white lilies are similarly laced together with brown and green foliage. In both Auxliadora’s and Lochner’s paintings, the flora and greenery frame the central figures as if drifting to the temporality of divinity rather than the earth’s grounding rhythms. At the very least, we are witnessing Auxiliadora channel Mãe Maria to form her terreiro gift through the divine inspiration communicated to her by Mãe’s heavenly messengers. The angel sweeping down from the upper right holds a small replica of the painting Auxiliadora is bringing to life: One can see the same Black Brazilian cultivators nurturing the land in each image. A man and woman, wearing the white, blue, and red colors of Mãe’s purity, devotion, and salvation, are fashioned in the Candomblé style of those rendered among Mãe’s marigolds in Flores no campo (Flowers in the field), 1974. An angel in the lower left carries a detail of the Autorretrato com Anjos painting showing dark earth and greenery, thus emphasizing the promise of Mãe’s forthcoming blooms on terreiro grounds. This angel and two others hold paint tubes and brushes, signifying their cocreation with Auxiliadora within this terreiro space. Reflecting upon how Auxiliadora presents herself in Autorretrato com Anjos, we might reconsider her isolation. Perhaps while listening to Auxiliadora “talk to herself” while she painted in her studio, folks were hearing her connect with Mãe Maria, her floral plant kin, and her seraphim. Maybe the innovations she achieved were a result of Mãe’s intervention and collaboration with Auxiliadora, Mãe’s handmaiden: “Mãe Maria, they called you to the flower of flowers.”54 Although Autorretrato com Anjos/Self-Portrait with Angels might be viewed as depicting Auxiliador’s faith in her eternal life in heaven and her painting’s ongoing-ness on earth through Mãe Maria’s providence, we might speculate that in the painting of her death Velório da Noiva/The Bride’s Wake (1974) (see Figure 41.3), Auxiliadora was not afraid. We know we are witnessing the miracles of quilombo religiosity because Auxiliadora 538

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Figure 41.2 Maria Auxiliadora da Silva, Autorretrato com anjos/Self-Portrait with Angels, 1972. Oil and polyester paste on canvas, 25 × 17.7 in. (63.5 × 45 cm). Coleção de Silvia e Mario Gorski, São Paulo.

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Figure 41.3 Maria Auxiliadora da Silva, The Bride’s Wake/Velório da Noiva, 1974. Oil and polyester paste on canvas, 19.6 × 39.3 in. (50 × 100 cm). Museu de Arte de São Paulo, (MASP).

presents herself lying in repose in an interior terreiro space. She paints a thick forest green floor with black undertones and renders the windowsills in the scene similarly. This establishes the sense that we are in an intimate space that, like Terreiro de Candomblé, exists beyond the surveillance of the oppressors and within which the wonders of Black ritual practice might occur. Auxiliadora suggests a copresenting of Black Atlantic divine feminine during her death ceremony, a moment representing one’s journey back home to oneself through ongoing collaboration with “plants, spirits, and ancestors.”55 The embroidered floral patterns of Nanã Buruku, “the oldest female orisha, mother of mothers,” comprises the lace gown and veil swaddling Auxiliadora’s corpse in loving protection.56 The same spiritual fabric is used to form the drapery around the window to signify Nanã’s guidance at the crossroads between earth and heaven.57 The terreiro ground evokes Mãe Maria’s gardens and the fertile earth of Nanã Buruku, who is sovereign over black, muddy soil and realms, including the clay that gives birth to all humankind and to which all will return.58 Given Auxiliadora’s simultaneous conjuring of the Catholic Mãe Maria and the Candomblé Nanã Buruku, we see that at the moment of her death—like those living Black Atlantic terreiro lives of liminality and agency—she is, in her self-directed way, entreating both feminine deities for their grace and protection.59

Postscript Like others who have written about Auxiliadora recently, I think of the concepts of willingness to help, comfort, and accept all others evoked by the colorful flowers of Mãe Maria’s gardens and Auxiliadora’s name, which loosely translates into “Mary Help of C ­ hristians.”60 The paintings of Auxiliadora were created not only for her protection and grace but also for the collective deliverance of all women. I can’t imagine the attitude of devoted kindness evoked by her name being extended to a limited few rather than a bountiful 540

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all-­encompassing everyone. The loving care that Mãe Maria and her other Black Atlantic sister deities provide to Auxiliadora—and to which the artist has devoted herself—operates according to the dynamics of intersecting spacetimes of the now, pulsing with a liminal verve beyond the confines of linear temporalities and fixed bounds.61 As such, it is an everconstant shelter amidst various storms encountered by the vulnerable, wherever they may be. During this terrible time, when women’s autonomy is under attack in the United States, Mãe Maria would feel empathy for and offer guidance and support to women about their freedom to choose.

Notes 1 Star Catherine Feliz, “Revolutionary Plant Power & Ancestral Folk Medicine with Catherine Feliz,” Soundcloud audio, 59: 17, December 2021, https://soundcloud.com/risen-witch/ ep79-revolutionary-plant-power-ancestral-folk-medicine-with-catherine-feliz. 2 Ibid. 3 Luciane Ramos Silva, Tanya Saunders, and Sarah S. Ohmer, “Introduction: From Solidão, to Isolation, to Solidão-rity,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 49 (Fall/Winter, 2021): 17. 4 Silva, Saunders, and Ohmer, “Introduction: From Solidão, to Isolation,” 23. 5 Feminist scholars, Silva, Saunders and Ohmer draw upon the positions—Black womanhood (a distinction tied to gender assignment at birth), and Black femininity (not contingent on being assigned female gender at birth)—in their analysis of the new frameworks through which we might begin to rethink solidarities in the Black Atlantic (Silva, Saunders, Ohmer, 17–18). 6 Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 4. 7 Wright, Physics of Blackness, 145. 8 Pollyana Quintella, “Maria Auxiliadora: No Terraço do Mundo,” in Maria Auxiliadora [­exhibition catalogue], ed. Pollyana Quintella (São Paulo: Galeria Estaçao, 2021), 45. http://www.galeriaestacao.com.br/documents/catalog_119_41594-catalogo-maria-auxiliadora-no-terraco-do-mundo.pdf. 9 Luciane Ramos Silva, Black Brazilians on the Move: Keynote Address, Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, Duke University, 2020 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Dance Studies Association, 2021): 124–125. 10 Fernando Oliva and Adriano Pedrosa, “Maria Auxiliadora: Everyday Life, Painting and Resistance, 10.3–2.6.2018,” Art Museum of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, https://masp.org.br/ exposicoes/maria-auxiliadora-da-silva-vida-cotidiana-pintura-e-resistencia 11 Christen Smith, Archie Davis, and Bethânia Gomes, “‘In Front of the World’: Translating Beatriz Nascimento,” Antipode 53, no. 1 (2021): 8. 12 Ibid., 10. 13 Christen Smith, “Towards a Black Feminist Model of Black Atlantic Liberation: Remembering Beatriz Nascimento,” Meridians 14, no. 2 (2016): 77. 14 Smith, “Remembering Beatriz Nascimento,” 78. 15 Thomas E. Skidmore, “Race and Class in Brazil: Historical Perspectives,” Luso-Brazilian Review 20, no. 1 (Summer, 1983): 110. 16 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 5. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 18. 20 Ibid. 21 See a reproduction of Maria Auxiliadora da Silva, Terreiro de Candomblé, 1970. 60 × 80. Coleção de Ivonaldo Veloso de Melo, here: https://pratofeito.substack.com/p/carta-aberta-a-branquitude. 22 Abdias Do Nascimento, “African Culture in Brazilian Art,” Journal of Black Studies 8, no. 2 (June 1978): 403–404, 414–416. 23 João Ferreira Dias, “The Horse in Yorùbá Culture and Candomblé,” in Adarrum, accessed June 15, 2022, https://jfdias.hypotheses.org/567

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Genevieve Hyacinthe 4 Quintella, “Maria Auxiliadora: No Terraço do Mundo,” 45. 2 25 Marta Mestre, “Strange Adjective: Maria Auxiliadora,” in Maria Auxiliadora: Daily Life, Painting and Resistance, eds.  Adriano Pedrosa and Fernando Oliva (São Paulo: MASP, 2018), 87, https://martamestre.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Maria-Auxiliadora_-­ Adjetivoesdru%CC%81xulo-_-txt-_-eng.pdf. 26 Skidmore, “Race and Class in Brazil: Historical Perspectives,” 110. 27 Henry John Drewal, “Introduction,” in Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas, ed. Henry John Drewal (Los Angeles, CA: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2008), 60. 28 Renata Bittencourt, “Painting with Mandinga: Maria Auxiliadora da Silva’s Capoeira, 1970,” Art School, accessed June 11, 2020, https://www.afterallartschool.org/essays/painting-with-mandinga/ 29 Mestre, “Strange Adjective; Maria Auxiliadora,” 86. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 “Maria Auxiliadora da Silva, Flores no campo,” ArtUK, accessed May 26, 2022, https://artuk.org/ discover/artists/auxiliadora-da-silva-maria-19351974; “Mary Help of Christians,” ­Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural. 33 Rita Jacinto, “Marigolds,” Botanical.com, https://botanical.com/site/column_rita/marigold.html 34 Jacinto, “Marigolds.” 35 Vincenzina Krymow, Mary’s Flower Gardens, Legends & Meditations, 3rd ed. (Phoenix: Faith & Flowers, 2017), 12, 124–125. 36 Art critic and collector of Auxiliadora’s work Mário Schenberg first described the “chromatic vibration” radiated by her paintings. See Quintella, “Maria Auxiliadora: No ­Terraço do Mundo,” 46. João Francisco Neto called her art “subversive” in João Francisco Neto, “Maria Auxiliadora da Silva,” March 18, 2018, https://medium.com/araet%C3%A1/maria-auxiliadora-da-silva-8742b6193b85. 37 Smith, “Towards a Black Feminist Model of Black Atlantic Liberation,” 72. 38 Star Catherine Feliz, “Earth Healing Back to the People,” Botánica Cimarrón, accessed June 16, 2022, https://botanicacimarron.love/pages/about 39 Feliz, “Earth Healing Back to the People.” 40 The extended title of Fred Moten’s Black and Blur, part of his book series on African American art and philosophy, is Black and Blur: Consent Not to Be a Single Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). See Moten’s “Preface,” vii–xii, where he describes his sense of collective “blackness,” particularly xiii. 41 Star Catherine Feliz, Mensaje para escribiente/Message for the Scribe, 2016, https://vimeo.com/158 713018?embedded=true&source=vimeo_logo&owner=49937212 42 Abena P. A. Busia, “What Is Africa to Me? Knowledge Possession, Knowledge Production, and the Health of Our Bodies Politic in Africa and the Africa Diaspora,” African Studies Review 49, no. 1 (April 2006): 17. 43 Sue Houchins in conversation with Baltasar Fra-Molinero, “She Saw Herself as the Bride of Christ: The Story of an African Nun in 18th-Century Spain,” ed. Emily ­McConville, Bates College News, December 7, 2018, https://www.bates.edu/news/2018/12/07/she-saw-herselfas-the-bride-of-christ-the-story-of-an-african-nun-in-18th-century-spain/ 44 Colm Tóibin, foreword to The Adventures of the Black Girl in Search for God (London: Hesperus Press Limited, 2006), X. 45 The quoted text was taken from the description accompanying the video, Star Catherine Feliz, Mensaje para escribiente/Message for the Scribe, 2016. 46 Quintella, “Maria Auxiliadora: No Terraço do Mundo,” 45. 47 Maier, 329. 48 Theresa L. Miller, Plant Kin: A Multispecies Ethnography in Indigenous Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019), 18. 49 Concerning the number of siblings in Auxiliadora’s family, and discussion of her facets of her biography, including family origin, see Quintella, “Maria Auxiliadora: No Terraço do Mundo,” 45. Mestre also provides solid insights into Auxiliadora’s biography in Mestre, “Strange Adjective: Maria Auxiliadora,” 83. 50 Quintella, 45.

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Nossa Mãe Maria of Terreiro Life and Faith on Black Grounds 51 Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva, “Daily Life, Painting and Resistance: Maria ­Auxiliadora da Silva’s Forgotten Work,” May 29, 2018, https://www.frieze.com/article/daily-life-painting-and-resistance-mariaauxiliadora-da-silvas-forgotten-work 52 Sunbelz, “Maria Auxiliadora: The Self Taught Brazilian Painter from Minas Gerais and Most ­ Influential in the History of Art and Western  Culture,” accessed November 8, 2018, https://­sunbelzz.wordpress.com/2018/11/08/maria-auxiliadorathe-self-taught-brazilian-painter-­ from-minas-­gerais-and-most-influential-in-the-history-of-art-and-western-culture/. 53 Krymow, Mary’s Flower Gardens, 132. 54 Vincenzina Krymow, “Honoring Mary in Your Garden,” St. Anthony Messenger, Franciscan Media, May 2017, https://www.franciscanmedia.org/st-anthony-messenger/may-2017/honoring-maryin-your-garden. 55 Star Catherine Feliz, “Revolutionary Plant Power.” 56 Patricia Rodrigues de Souza, “Candomblé: A Religion for All Senses,” Material Religion 16, no. 3 (2020): 369. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Sharpe, In the Wake. 60 For Julia Bryan-Wilson musing on the meaning of Auxiliadora’s name during pandemic times, see Bryan-Wilson, “Maria Auxiliadora da Silva, Resistance and Survival,” 4Columns, May 1, 2020, https://4columns.org/bryan-wilson-julia/maria-auxiliadora-da-silva. For the translation of Auxiliadora’s name used in this essay, see the Itaú Cultural Encyclopedia, last updated October 29, 2021, https://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa8785/maria-auxiliadora 61 Wright, Physics of Blackness, 145.

Selected Bibliography Bittencourt, Renata. “Painting with Mandinga: Maria Auxiliadora da Silva’s Capoeira, 1970.” ­Afterall Art School. 2020. https://www.afterallartschool.org/essays/painting-with-mandinga/. Do Nascimento, Abdias. “African Culture in Brazilian Art.” Journal of Black Studies 8, no. 2 (June 1978): 389–422. Krymow, Vincenzina. Mary’s Flower Gardens, Legends & Meditations. Phoenix: Faith & Flowers, 2017. Mestre, Marta. “Strange Adjective: Maria Auxiliadora.” In Maria Auxiliadora: Daily Life, Painting and Resistance. eds. Adriano Pedrosa and Fernando Oliva, 78–89. São Paulo: ­ MASP, 2018. https://martamestre.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Maria-Auxiliadora_-­Adjetivoesdru%CC%81xulo-_-txt-_-eng.pdf. Oliva, Fernando, and Adriano Pedrosa. “Maria Auxiliadora: Everyday Life, Painting and Resistance, 10.3–2.6.2018.” Art Museum of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand. https://masp.org.br/exposicoes/ maria-auxiliadora-da-silva-vida-cotidiana-pintura-e-resistencia. Quintella, Pollyana. “Maria Auxiliadora: No Terraço do Mundo.” In Maria Auxiliadora [exhibition catalogue], ed. Pollyana Quintella, 1–47. São Paulo: Galeria Estaçao, 2021. http://www.galeriaestacao.com.br/documents/catalog_119_41594-catalogo-maria-auxiliadora-no-terraco-do-mundo. pdf.Ramos Silva, Luciane, Tanya Saunders, and Sarah S. Ohmer. “Introduction: From Solidão, to Isolation, to Solidão-rity.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 49 (Fall/Winter, 2021): 15–49. Rodrigues de Souza, Patricia. “Candomblé: A Religion for All Senses.” Material Religion 16, no. 3 (2020): 368–370. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Skidmore, Thomas E. “Race and Class in Brazil: Historical Perspectives.” Luso-Brazilian Review 20, no. 1 (Summer, 1983): 104–118. Smith, Christen, Archie Davis, and Bethânia Gomes. “‘In Front of the World’: Translating Beatriz Nascimento.” Antipode 53, no. 1 (2021): 279–316. Wright, Michelle M. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

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42 MICHAEL RICHARDS Performance as Ritual and Black-Indigenous Haptic Visuality1 Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa

A digital painting of a winged being, amorphously shaped and colored in browns blending into grays and whites, initiates the ritual video performance. Its eyes look up, as its wings rise and fall. Percussive ambience interwoven with what appear to be sounds of jets provides the aural backdrop for the ritual that is about to unfold. In the next sequence, a human in profile comes into view with most of their Black body remaining off frame. The head’s shadow is visible on the bottom left corner of the frame, while the arms occupy center stage. The left arm awaits, with its elbow slightly bent, while the right hand holds a small, feathered lance that pierces into the skin on the outer bottom edge of the inner left wrist. Slowly but surely, the lance emerges through the skin at the top upper edge of the wrist. The video performance ritual cuts to another digital painting. This one features a Medusa figure with four snakes on its head, outlined in white against a brown backdrop. On both sides of the Medusa are wings that seem to light up, as if in flight. The viewer is brought closer, until the Medusa’s face takes up the entire frame. The image of the human figure returns, this time from the right side of the frame which captures the back side of the bent arm. In the next gesture, the arm extends to reveal five feathered lances that have been pierced through the skin on the inside of the arm. The feathers descend below the arm, as the lances ascend above it. As if gently tracing the heart meridian, the ritual proceeds up the arm.2 The figure pierces another feathered lance through the surface of the skin of the inner mid-forearm. The previous gesture repeats, in which the figure extends its adorned, feather-pierced arm in a regal display. A series of close-up shots of the ritual performance—some in black and white, and others in color with a blue backdrop—are then interspersed with images of the winged Medusa. The piercing ritual continues, in the absence of blood. I sit and watch in a state of wonder, contemplating the figure before me, suspended in embodied oppositions between ascent and descent, flesh and blood, human and animal, and body and spirit. In this wonderous liminality, time slows down, and my heart rate moves from a state of ascent to one of descent. In yet another repetition, a third feathered lance is pierced into the inner crease of the elbow. This piercing takes more effort, as indicated by the lance that momentarily struggles DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-48 544

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to make its way through the other side of the skin. The viewer is invited to observe this action up close: the camera zooms in to focus clearly on the skin, delicately tethered to the lance that pulls on it from the inside. The action is made visceral just as the lance finally breaks through the skin. The winged Medusa continues to watch over. The figure’s hand takes over the gestural component of the ritual. It slowly makes a fist to create tension throughout the arm, before rotating downward, then upward, while the feathers pierced into the forearm rotate and glide through the surrounding space. The hand opens toward the sky, as its fingers graciously uncurl and release the built-up tension. In its final appearance, the winged brown arm performs against the blue backdrop. Here, a mirroring effect is applied to produce an image of metamorphosis in which two featherpierced arms grow out of each other, forming one extended shape (Figure 42.1). Viewing the conjoined, winged arms from this angle, it is as if the metamorphic shape opens out to the universe, evoking the lit wings of the Medusa that has been witnessing. This witnessing becomes most apparent in the next repetition in which the inner crease of the elbow is pierced, while images of the Medusa are intercut and appear to be superimposed directly onto that area of the skin. As the video performance ritual ends, it refocuses on the Medusa. A color-inverted image of the Medusa is repeatedly intercut, creating a flashing visual ­sensation that suggests a movement and an attempt to achieve velocity and escape. The piece described above titled “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity” (1995) is a video performance that is intimately related to Michael Richards’ sculpture, Winged (1999). Winged,

Figure 42.1  Michael Richards and Jeff Severtson, Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity, 1995, 3:22 ­minutes, video still. Courtesy of the Michael Richards Estate.

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which could be viewed as a sculptural representation of the video, is one of ­Richards’ works in which he used his own body as a cast. Richards used this technique for many other works, transforming sculpture and performance into their shared expanded fields. For example, one of Richards’ most well-known pieces, Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian (1999), is sculpted from his full body posing in a standing, meditative posture, while miniature planes referencing the Tuskegee Airmen pierce into him.3 Given his tragic death during the 9/11 attacks while working in his studio on the 92nd floor of the Twin Towers, for many, the work has evoked a sense of prescience.4 In this chapter, I examine “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity” and Winged as examples of Richards’ embodied decolonial art practice which I read as strategic engagements with ritual, abjection, flesh and materiality, as well as ancestral memories pertaining to Black and Indigenous alliances. They highlight Richards’ method of intertwining performance and sculpture, in which he used his body to write histories, including those related to other Black performance cultures such as blackface. I examine Richards’ exploration of blackface in relation to “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity” and Winged because of common themes and methods that emerge in these works, such as abjection and the performance of flesh. In these sculptural and performance-based works, Richards presents a dialectic between the visibility and invisibility of Blackness through the haptic imagery of his Black skin. The use of haptic imagery as a decolonial strategy in the works discussed below produces an intimate encounter with the viewer and alludes to the generative uses of abjection to liberate Black and Brown bodies. “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity,” which was made in collaboration with fellow artist Jeff Severtson, could be interpreted as Richards’ imaginative re-enactment of ritual as performed by his West African and Amerindian ancestors, given his interests in such ritual practices.5 I first began to engage with Richards’ interests in Amerindian cultures during my initial research and writing about his work in 2019.6 That year, I had the privilege of learning more about Richards’ exploration of these practices and the development of Winged from his close friend and fellow artist william cordova7 who informed me of the video performance, but at the time did not know of its whereabouts. According to cordova, “Ritual was implied in all of Michael’s work.”8 cordova spoke of Richards’ deep interest in the Indigenous people of the Caribbean, and Central and South America, since Richards’ ancestry was Jamaican and Costa Rican. More specifically, cordova suggested that for “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity,” Richards was inspired by the intersection of Amerindian and West African ritual, particularly the Taíno and Arawak Indians of the Caribbean and South America, as well as the Guna Indians of Panama and Colombia. We might view the performed ritual in “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity” as an example of what Barbadian poet and scholar Edward Kamau Brathwaite refers to as an “embodied archive” of knowledge produced from ancestral memory.9 In “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity,” Richards performs ancestral memories that evoke the “edgeless distinction” between genocide and slavery, a concept offered by Tiffany Lethabo King, scholar of Black Studies and Indigenous Studies: “Edgeless distinction is a haptic moment, shared, and a ceremonial Black and Indigenous ritual.”10 A visual strategy that Richards employs to represent this “haptic moment” is by way of his creation of “haptic images” that call into question what is considered abject, thus merging form and content. The video performance of “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity” reveals a critical component of the creative process—the piercing ritual—that is also depicted in the sculpture Winged. In this way, both the video and the sculpture document the ritual performance. In the video, which also functions as a documented performance, we see Richards manipulating his body 546

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from the outside in, and the inside out, using ritual objects to sculpt his flesh for the viewer. In my conversation with cordova, he had suggested that part of Richards’ motivation was to challenge the colonialist anthropological gaze to which artists of color have been subject. Non-Western ritual practices since the beginnings of the colonial encounter have often been met by this same gaze. Perhaps Richards had intended to return this gaze, by bringing the piercing action up close to the viewer, thus creating what film scholar Laura Marks has called “haptic images”—a strategy used by intercultural filmmakers to challenge the mastery of the colonial gaze.11 The close-up shots described in the video at the beginning of this chapter demonstrate Richards’ performance of “haptic visuality.” This cinematographic gesture invites a durational co-performance involving the viewer, which also reflects ­Richards’ durational performances of everyday life. In the poignant words of cordova, “His very being was a constant performance of endurance within the hierarchy of the m ­ ainstream art world.”12 Thus, we might view both his durational performances of ­everyday life and his formal art practice as decolonial interventions in the art world. Alongside his deployment of “haptic visuality” is Richards’ dialectical engagement with visibility and invisibility, as it relates to Blackness. In the video performance, fragments of his body come in and out of the frame. Depending on whether we see his limbs in front of the blue backdrop in the color shots or in front of the white background in the black-andwhite shots, his flesh appears black, brown, or even white, according to one viewer. When read as black, the close-up shots of flesh that evoke “haptic visuality” become almost excessive, thus offering the viewer an alternative engagement with “excess flesh,” as theorized by visual studies scholar Nicole Fleetwood. Though Fleetwood’s conceptualization of “excess flesh” pertains to explicit representations of Black female sexuality by Black women artists (such as one of Richards’ collaborators, Renee Cox discussed below), I use her framework here to demonstrate how Richards makes black flesh simultaneously performative, excessive, and ambiguous. According to Fleetwood, “excess flesh” is a performative strategy and conceptual framework for understanding “hypervisibility” in relation to Black bodies that are always invisible and visible, or underexposed and always exposed: “Excess flesh is not necessarily a liberatory enactment. It is a performative that doubles visibility: to see the codes of visuality operating on the (hyper)visible body that is its object.”13 In “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity,” Richards allows us to see the codes of visuality operating on his (hyper)visible Black-Brown body, by bringing it up close to meet our gaze. As well, there is a play on the visibility and invisibility of the interiority of the body by way of the piercing ritual. On one hand, this could allude to Brathwaite’s invitation to turn our attention to the interiority of the body—the “inner plantation” so to speak, where we connect with ancestors to produce knowledge as the basis of embodied archives.14 On the other hand, the piercing ritual, which produces no blood, is a play on visual representations of abjection. In Julia Kristeva’s theorization of abjection, in which the primary causes of horrific reactions include images of blood, feces, and corpses, she also suggests that there is unique potential in the writer who is “fascinated by the abject, imagines its logic, projects himself into it, introjects it, and as a consequence perverts language—style and content.”15 While she writes about abjection in a literary context, her framework has been generative in the analysis of visual art and performance by artists of color.16 In Richards’ performance, he projects himself into the abject through the act of piercing, thus perverting and decolonizing art practice. As well, Richards’ performance ritual evokes Kristeva’s belief in the purifying power of mimesis, repetition, and artistic expression whereby the original abjection is brought into being differently through its “radical jettisoning” and re-presentation of 547

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inside/outside, subject/object, and abject/deject.17 If we productively view Richards’ work through the lens of abjection, he performs the work of jettisoning the “excess” of both the stereotyped body and its flesh. This cathartic jettisoning is most evident in his choice to move fragments of his body in and out of the frame, while also making another reference to abjection by alluding to the merger of humans with animals by way of the feathered lances with which he pierces himself.18 A genre of performance that has often been discussed in the realm of abjection is durational performance, which informs Richards’ performance and sculpture-making processes as well as his performances of daily life. Using his own body as a cast for life-sized works in his decolonial interventions, Richards sculpted his corporeal materiality as an act of endurance. The process of body casting is a unique form of sculpture making that involves elements of risk and duration because of the multiple layers required to produce the final product—including the initial molds (possibly made of silicone or urethane) and the final mother mold which, in Richards’ creative process, were likely made of plaster bandage. I think of the risk involved in this process when considering Richards’ works in which his head was cast. To make these pieces, he would have had to cast his entire head with multiple layers of material, leaving only his nostrils exposed. In this precarious state, he would have also had to sit still for approximately an hour or two, waiting for the cast to set.19 As he endured this process, I wonder if he meditated, which could explain the meditative affect produced by works like Tar Baby vs. Saint Sebastian and another work made from the cast of his head titled A Loss of Faith Brings Vertigo (1994), in which five heads are tilted upward, as if in contemplation. In other life-sized works, such as Winged, which may not have involved as much risk, he cast his limbs to produce a gestural sculpture that evokes a sense of timelessness typically associated with durational performances which characterize aspects of “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity.” Two years before I learned of the existence of the video of “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity,” I encountered Winged in 2019 as part of the exhibition Michael Richards: Winged, curated by Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin, at Stanford University.20 During this encounter, I was immediately drawn to the sculpture’s performative display as well as its ethereal and timeless presence. Little did I know that two years later, this piece would come to life in the ritual I witnessed in “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity.” At the time, as the ongoing project to enliven Richards’ legacy continued to unfold, I was presented with the unique opportunity to engage this poignant video artwork and performance document, which animates the sculpture that drew me in when I first encountered it. The resurfacing of “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity” coincides with the revival of Richards’ body of work, about which little has been written.21 As I put this work into conversation with Winged, I am contributing to the ongoing, decolonial efforts to write Richards into art history to which other curators and scholars have committed. Winged, the sculptural iteration of “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity,” is made from bonded bronze and metal. Suspended in space by thin cables attached from above, Winged depicts the figure’s floating musculature with feathers that function as armature and adornment, as they protrude from the forearms and wrists (Figure 42.2). However, the representation of piercing in the sculpture differs from that of the performance. In the latter, the lances pierce through the surface layer of the skin whereas in the former, the lances appear to pierce through the muscular layer of the limb, as if making its way through the space between the radius and the ulna. As well, the sculpture re-enacts the gestural component of “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity,” as the conjoined arms create a disorienting 548

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Figure 42.2  Michael Richards, Winged, 1999, bonded bronze and metal, 20 × 38 × 4 inches. Courtesy of the Michael Richards Estate. Photograph by Oriol Tarridas.

effect. At the same time, they appear relaxed, as their hands offer a caress, thus evoking a similar feeling that arises when watching the arms gracefully opening out to the universe during the video performance ritual. As I sense into both the sculptural and performative iterations of the ritual, Winged and “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity” perform a delicate duet across time and space. The title of the latter, which might suggest a resistance to the forward march of progress and modernity, speaks to the timelessness evoked by the floating sculpture.22 In Richards’ durational and contemplative sculpture-making process, he created timeless and alchemical representations, evident in both form and content, such as in the selection of works discussed thus far, which also resonate with other pieces in his body of work.23 In referencing each other, many of these works function like pieces in a historiographic puzzle, creating a narrative for the perceivers who encounter them.24 Richards’ performative and embodied engagement with sculpture also extended to his collaborations with other fellow artists. For example, fellow Jamaican-American artist Renee Cox, known for her performance-based photographs, has spoken about Richards’ involvement in the sculpture she created as part of her Yo Mama series.25 He assisted her in the full body casting process for the sculpture featured in Yo Mama and the Statue (1993), as well as in an earlier iteration of one of her most well-known and controversial photographic works, The Last Supper (1996). The earlier iteration depicted Black Panthers who stood in for Jesus’ disciples, with Richards posing as one of the models. Though Richards is primarily known for his sculptural and visual art works, performance was certainly in the realm of his praxis. Many of his works thematically address black performance cultures, including the World War II 549

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military performances of the Tuskegee Airmen, the Doo-wop groups of the 1940s, and the minstrel shows of the early twentieth century.26 Like “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity” and Winged, Richards’ works that address blackface performance fall within the realm of abjection and touch on similar themes of “excess flesh.” For example, Let Me Entertain You (1993) is a self-portrait of Richards in blackface that highlights the dialectic between the invisibility and visibility of the Black body. By applying black paint on his own black face, he performs his “excess flesh” to allow the viewer to “see the codes of visuality operating on the (hyper)visible body that is its object.”27 For example, in one of the elements from the original 1993 installation that was on view at the 2019 Stanford exhibition, Richards staged a historical dressing room of the legendary Bahamian-American blackface performer, Bert Williams. Using four silkscreened mirrors as the medium for a reflexive self-portrait, Richards documents his own performance as Williams doubling up in blackface, perhaps as an ambivalent homage to the fellow Caribbean American artist who preceded him. In one mirror, he gazes upon his own reflection. In another, he gazes toward the sky. In another, he reveals his own teeth, reversing the action forced upon slave ancestors. And in yet another, his gaze defiantly meets ours. Shadow and light cut across his countenance, revising Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks to Black Skin, Black Masks, as he demands, “Black Enough for You?,” which are the words that appear in white italicized print across his mouth. The viewer is left with this question and the images produced by the artist’s haptic engagement with blackface (Figure 42.3). Let Me Entertain You along with Richards’ other works about minstrelsy call to mind Black artists of the same decade in which he was working, who were similarly influenced

Figure 42.3  Michael Richards, Let Me Entertain You (detail), 1993, mixed media installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Michael Richards Estate.

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by Fanon, explored the cathartic potential of abjection, and presented alternative conceptions to time as rejections of modernity.28 For example, William Pope.L’s crawls which have taken many forms since the late 1980s directly reference Fanon. In his analysis of the crawls, performance studies scholar Andrew Lepecki cites Fanon’s famous quote from Black Skin White Masks which hails him as a subject, “Look a Negro!” followed by a description of his movement after suffering the impact of the “word-bullet/signifier in the stumbling ground of racism”:29 “I progress by crawling … I am fixed.” Thus, Lepecki continues, Pope.L donned his suit as he embraced the only movement identified by Fanon that was available to him as a Black man—crawling. Pope.L’s most famous crawls took place on the ground of Times Square and around Tompkins Square Park. Building on the artist’s commentary as well as the work of other spatial theorists and cultural studies scholars, Lepecki suggests that the act of crawling—an action associated with abjection—serves as a rejection of verticality, phallocratic uses of space, and the forward movement of progress and modernity. Art historian Derek Conrad Murray and film scholar Soraya Murray also examine Pope.L’s challenge to verticality via “the insertion of his body as an abject signifier of blackness/poverty/homelessness into the public domain” and identify the potential of his work to transform and critique ideologies of the American dream.30 The transformative potential that Murray and Conrad Murray identify in Pope.L’s crawls resonates with Kristeva’s notion of the cathartic potential of abjection in their discussion of the ways in which the artist espouses “the contrary, the ambivalent, the abject, in another form of exorcistic ritual” to reveal the oppressive nature of normativity and legitimacy. Similarly, in Richards’ works discussed above, he represents the cathartic potential of abjection, whether by exorcising the ghosts of minstrel shows through his own blackface performance or performing actions that connect him to ancestral memories such as piercing rituals which are often associated abjection; however, because the ritual in “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity” does not produce blood, there is an underlying ambivalence with regard to representations of abjection. In Winged, abjection is aestheticized in the depiction of the suspended piercing ritual that floats in time and space, thus throwing into question our perceptions of what constitutes the abject. In this way, Richards brings the original abjection into being differently, by making it beautiful. In Richards’ performative and sculptural representations of African and Amerindian ritual practices as well as Black performance cultures that I have considered here, “histories of the present” come alive.31 Richards’ poetic engagements with ritual, abjection, as well as flesh and materiality, reflect the alchemies of performative Blackness, ritual, and resistance. In these embodied ruminations on ancestral memories, the historical trauma associated with Black performance cultures, and the possibility of escape and freedom through alternative conceptions of time, the ephemeral nature of Richards’ performances is made ever present. In so doing, they shuttle between the realms of visibility and invisibility. Winged and propelled in multiple directions, the futurist sculptor of history remains and soars above and below. He equips his audiences with weaponry in the form of memory, so that we, too, may continue the work of sculpting re-imaginings for the future in light of ancestral remembrances of the past. Therein lies the power of the decolonial artistic legacy he left behind: by firmly situating his body in these works in which the original abjection is brought into being differently, albeit ambivalently, he produces visceral reactions in the viewer. He gestures toward us, prompting us to co-perform, to imagine, and to witness the durational and ritual performances he so elegantly crafted. 551

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Notes 1 I would like to thank Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin for providing me with a digitized copy of “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity,” for their invaluable assistance and insight throughout my research, and for their feedback on this chapter. I would also like to thank Richards’ friends and collaborators, including william cordova, who gave feedback on this chapter and on my earlier writing about Richards’ work, as well as Jeff Severtson and Dread Scott who provided me with background information about Richards and the works discussed here. Finally, I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their insightful suggestions on this chapter. 2 In Chinese Medicine-based practices such as Qigong and acupuncture, the heart meridian runs along the inside of the arm. 3 The Tuskegee Airmen were the first African American aviators in the US military who served in World War II. See Joseph Caver, The Tuskegee Airmen: An Illustrated History, 1939–1949 (New Montgomery, AL: New South Books, 2011). 4 For example, see Elisa Turner, “Michael Richards’s Visionary Sculptures Mourn Dreams Deferred,” Hyperallergic, June 9, 2021, accessed January 2, 2022, https://hyperallergic.com/652421/ michael-richards-are-you-down-review-moca/. 5 Two years prior to Richards’ death, “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity” was presented as a video installation in a group exhibition at Ambrosino Gallery located in Miami, Florida. The video was completed in collaboration with Severtson who made the digital drawings of the Medusa (which were part of a fax art series he was working on at the time), as well as shot and edited the video. Richards and Severtson met while completing their MFAs at New York University. Severtson explained the process that went into making this work, which is an example of early computer art of the 1990s, when digital editing tools were just being developed. It was shot on tape, then digitized for editing and effects, and finally transferred back to Beta and VHS. Jeff Severtson, video-conferencing call with the author, July 22, 2021. 6 I wrote an exhibition review titled “Michael Richards’s Alchemical Performances of Blackness,” which was published in Art Practical on March 20, 2019. The publication has since ceased to exist. As of this writing, the archived article can be accessed on the Internet Archive’s Archive-It page, accessed January 2, 2022, https://wayback.archive-it.org/15633/20210126014844/https:// www.artpractical.com/column/michael-richards-alchemical-performances-of-blackness/. 7 The artist intentionally uses lowercase to spell his name. 8 william cordova, email correspondence with the author, February 28, 2019. 9 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Caribbean Man in Space and Time,” in “Caribbean Studies,” special issue, Savacou, nos. 11–12 (September 1975): 9; reprinted in Small Axe 66 (November 2021). 10 Tiffany Lethabo King, preface to The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), x–xi. 11 See chapter titled “The Memory of Touch,” in Laura Marks, The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 12 william cordova, email correspondence with the author, February 28, 2019. 13 Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 112. 14 Brathwaite, 11. 15 Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 16. 16 See, for example, Karen Shimakawa’s work on abjection in the context of Asian American racialization in theater and performance. Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 17 Kristeva, 28. 18 I thank the editors of the volume for pointing out the human-animal merger, which is related to what I interpret here as Richards’ engagements with abjection, given the way in which colonized people have been dehumanized throughout the history of colonization. 19 Special thanks to Terry Berlier, sculptor and Stanford Professor of Art Practice, who explained the complex process of body casting to me. 20 This exhibition was presented by the Department of Art and Art History at the Stanford Art Gallery, from January 22 through March 24, 2019. Until recently, the whereabouts of the video were unknown. In 2021, the video was resurfaced by Dawn Dale, Richards’ cousin, and curators

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Performance as Ritual and Black-Indigenous Haptic Visuality Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin—the three of whom are the stewards of his prolific body of work, and have been working diligently and carefully to preserve and reassemble the rich collection and archive he left behind. In the documentary about Richards titled Are You Down?, which was screened as part of the exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami on August 2, 2021, Dale discusses her role in preserving his work. She stated that when Richards passed, his father was ready to dispose of his artwork that was in storage, but she asked him not to and agreed to store the work in her garage. See Are You Down? produced and directed by Juan Matos and Dennis Scholl, and co-produced by Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin (2023; Oolite Arts), 31 minutes.   Fialho and Levin’s engagement with Richards’ art began in earnest in 2016, in the context of conceiving and curating the exhibition, Michael Richards: Winged at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. They have since worked closely with Dale through every step of the stewardship process, including research, conservation, and multiple exhibitions. Fialho and Levin curated Michael Richards: Are You Down? at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami. The retrospective featured the most recently preserved works and ran from April 21 to October 10, 2021, marking the 20th anniversary of September 11, the date of Richards’ death. It was the largest ever exhibition of his work to date, including sculptures, drawings, and documentation of site-specific installations and images of no longer extant work. 21 As of this writing, there have been no academic or peer-reviewed articles or books written about Richards’ work. Reviews of the 2021 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami appeared in publications such as Frieze and Hyperallergic (for the latter, see note 5). In addition, critically acclaimed Haitian-American novelist and MacArthur Fellow, Edwidge Danticat wrote an essay about Richards in her book, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). A monograph titled Michael Richards: Are You Down? will be published in 2023/2024 by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami and the Center for Art, Research and Alliances, edited by Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin; it will feature contributions by Danticat, Fialho and Levin, and Franklin Sirmans. 22 Special thanks to the editors for offering their interpretation of the title of “Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity” as a rejection of the forward movement of modernity and alternative conception of time. 23 Scholars and curators have commented on Richards’ strategic and alchemical use of materials. For example, he used bronze resin and marble dust which appear as bronze and marble in his sculptures, as discussed by Fialho and Levin during the gallery tour of the Stanford exhibition. At the Dialogue on Diaspora session of the symposium, Flight, Identity, Diaspora & Afterlife, which occurred on February 8, 2019 in conjunction with the exhibition, Stanford Assistant Professor of Art History Marci Kwon referred to alchemy and the “poetics of material” as important methods and concepts in Richards’ work. For a compilation of excerpts from the symposium, see “Michael Richards Symposium Compilation Video,” https://vimeo.com/369089718, accessed August 30, 2021. 24 For a discussion of another grouping of Richards’ works that reference one another by connecting the spectacular nature of contemporary instances of police brutality to the histories of lynching and blackface performance, see my review in the Art Practical online archive referenced in note 7. In this review, I discuss A Loss of Faith Brings Vertigo (1994), Same Old Song and Dance (1992), Let Me Entertain You (1993), and Fly Away O’ Glory (1995). 25 During a panel conversation that took place on June 16, 2021 in conjunction with the exhibition at MOCA Miami, Renee Cox spoke about this collaboration; both Richards and Cox were part of the Whitney Independent Study Program from 1992 to 1993, along with two other artists on the panel, Dread Scott and Lyle Ashton Harris. See “Conversations at MOCA: Michael Richards & the Whitney Independent Study Program,” https://vimeo.com/564256816, accessed August 14, 2021. 26 Examples of works about the Tuskegee Airmen and the Doo-wop groups include Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian (1999) and The Great Black Airmen (1996). Reflecting on the combination of words, “Tuskegee” and “Black Airmen,” one might wonder if some of the pilots were aligned with Tuskegee Indians, thus prompting a reimagining of Black Indians that expands the genealogies of Black and Brown alliances. Whether the African American Buffalo soldiers who valiantly deserted the US military to join the resistance against colonization and genocide during the Filipino American War, or the Black Seminoles who fought during the Seminole Wars, instances of Black

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Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa and Brown alliances worldwide are many, but are more often than not silenced in the master ­narratives of history. Hence, Richards’ historiographic interventions shed much needed light on these neglected histories by way of his decolonial art practices. 27 See note 14. 28 Another work that references blackface is the installation titled Same Old Song and Dance (1992), in which he relates the history of minstrelsy to lynching spectacles. 29 Andre Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York: Routledge, 2006), 96. 30 Derek Conrad Murray and Soraya Murray, “Public Ritual: William Pope.L and Exorcisms of Otherness,” Public Art Review, no. 1 Fall/Winter (2010): 26. 31 Various scholars (Michel Foucault and Gordon Chang, to name two) and journals have been dedicated to the concept of “histories of the present” which shed light on the ways in which history informs the present. See the journal History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History published by Duke University Press.

Selected Bibliography Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. “Caribbean Man in Space and Time.” In “Caribbean Studies,” special issue, Savacou, nos. 11–12 (September 1975); reprinted in Small Axe 66 (November 2021). Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Fleetwood, Nicole. Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011. King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Lepecki, Andre. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York: Routledge, 2006. Marks, Laura. The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Murray, Derek Conrad and Soraya Murray. “Public Ritual: William Pope.L and Exorcisms of Otherness.” Public Art Review, no. 1 Fall/Winter (2010): 22: 24–27. Shimakawa, Karen. National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Turner, Elisa. “Michael Richards’s Visionary Sculptures Mourn Dreams Deferred,” Hyperallergic, June 9, 2021, accessed January 2, 2022, https://hyperallergic.com/652421/michael-richards-are-youdown-review-moca/.

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43 BITTERSWEET HISTORIES AND TARNISHED GOLD Slavery’s Sounds, Sights, and Silences in the Legacy of Dutch Brazil Anuradha Gobin On July 1, 2019, choreographer and dancer Junadry Leocaria performed Sugar Coated in the Golden Room of the Mauritshuis in The Hague (see Figure 43.1).1 To accommodate an audience at this event, the floor of the grandest room in the museum was covered in cushions, to be used as seats by members of the public. The scattered cushions also imparted an air of informality to the normally imposing space. Sugar Coated began with Leocaria’s crouched body facing the central window in the Golden Room, flanked on either side by two grisaille female figures in trompe l’oeil niches. These two painted figures, dressed in classical robes, cast their eyes upward, as if admiring the lavishly decorated ceiling above. Dressed in a long, flowing skirt, with arms and torso exposed, Leocaria’s body slowly unfolded from its contained position on the floor below the two painted figures. Leocaria’s dance accompanied a song, played from a nearby speaker. This music introduced an aural dimension to a space usually associated with hushed commentary about the images located throughout. Employing movements and choreography referencing African dance traditions, Leocaria’s routine was a visual metamorphosis from vulnerability and subjugation to empowerment and forgiveness. The occasion of Leocaria’s poignant performance was Keti Koti (Chains Broken), a day that commemorates the abolition of slavery in the Dutch colonies of Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles. Today, the Mauritshius in The Hague is best known for housing paintings by renowned ‘Golden Age’ artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer, but the choice of location for Leocaria’s performance carried deeper significance, beyond simply being a publicly accessible space. The Mauritshuis art collection is housed in a seventeenth-century mansion, built by and named after Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen. Maurits was appointed governor of Brazil by the Dutch West India Company (WIC) in 1636, a position he held until 1644. Even before the Mauritshuis was completed, it was referred to as the Sugar Palace.2 This name may have been a reference to the light-colored natural stones of the building’s façade, but more obviously, alluded to the source of money that enabled the construction of this grand edifice: the cultivation, refinement, and sale of sugar. Johan Maurits earned vast fortunes for himself and WIC investors through trade in commodities like sugar that relied on the transplantation and subjugation of enslaved African men, women, and children. During Maurits’s governorship in Brazil, the WIC captured the 555

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Figure 43.1  Junadry Leocaria’s Sugar Coated Performance in the Golden Room at the Mauritshuis. Photo courtesy of the Mauritshuis and reproduced with permission from Junadry Leocaria.

fort of Elmina, located on the coast of present-day Ghana, thus beginning their involvement with the lucrative transatlantic slave trade. Ships were also sent to capture a slave market in Luanda in Angola and to the island of São Tomé to acquire more unpaid labor for Brazilian plantations. During Maurits’s short governorship, it is estimated that he oversaw the transportation of over 25,000 Africans to Brazil on behalf of the WIC. This figure does not include the thousands who did not survive the journey.3 The Dutch presence in Brazil was only for a relatively short period but it provided a blueprint for the WIC’s future colonial efforts throughout the Atlantic world. After the loss of Brazil to the Portuguese in 1654, the WIC focused their efforts on other places such as Curaçao and Suriname, where they were able to considerably expand their profits through increased transatlantic slave trade and a more defined plantation culture. The daily operations of Maurits’s own household in Brazil also heavily relied on slave labor. Maurits’s contract stipulated that all costs would be covered by the WIC to feed the residents and guests of his Brazilian home. In March 1643, Maurits submitted an invoice for food costs for 73 European members of his retinue, 80 enslaved Africans, 10 “Turks,” and 1 “Brazilian from Maranhão.”4 Further, there is convincing evidence that Maurits personally profited from the slave trade, employing schemes to hide the source of his illicitly gained wealth, including providing loans to Portuguese plantation owners in Brazil, to be repaid in Amsterdam.5 This covert personal involvement in the slave trade would have likely heavily supplemented Maurits’s 1,500 guilder per month salary as governor of Brazil. This salary would have been grossly inadequate to cover the cost of building the Mauritshuis, in addition to the other residences Maurits constructed for himself. Given Maurits’s connections to Brazil, the WIC, and the slave trade, multiple aspects of Sugar Coated raise important points for consideration. Leocaria, a Curaçaoan descended 556

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from enslaved Africans, regarded her performance as an opportunity to honor the legacy and story of her ancestors. According to Leocaria, her dance explored “the pain, the grief, the injustice and the struggle. But also the power, the perseverance, the creativity, the victory, the relief and the ability to forgive.”6 Her dance in the Golden Room was a symbolic reclaiming of space and insertion of the experience of black bodies that too often are ignored and rendered mute in the images that adorn the walls of institutions like the Mauritshuis. The historical white gaze, here symbolized by the two painted, female figures on the walls of the Golden Room, looked away from Leocaria, failing to register the labor source for the surrounding opulence. In contrast, Leocaria’s moving presentation allows us the opportunity to correct this colonial agnosia, bridging geographical and temporal divides, to recuperate the experiences and afterlives of the silenced, enslaved men and women from whom Leocaria is descended.7 It also presents us with the challenge of moving beyond the ocularcentrism that has subordinated other senses as a source of legitimate knowledge, as is often the case in art historical and museum studies. When Maurits returned to his newly completed mansion in The Hague, he brought with him several mementos from his time in Brazil, including a series of images produced by the artists Albert Eckhout and Frans Post.8 Also returning to the Netherlands with Maurits were half a dozen Tapuyas from Brazil. In August 1644, on the occasion of the festive opening of the newly completed Sugar Palace, they performed a traditional dance for Maurits’s guests. The dance took place against the backdrop of images produced about Brazil, including a canvas by Albert Eckhout depicting such an event (Tapuya Dance, 1640–1644). The audience at the celebrations at the Mauritshuis were privy to a live performance, similar to what was pictured on Eckhout’s canvas. Unlike the respectful attention given to Leocaria as she danced within the same walls as the Tapuya did 375 years earlier, the seventeenth-century performance received a much different reception. Some audience members mocked and laughed at the Tapuya dancers while others found it unpleasant, and a reflection of the savagery of the indigenous Brazilians.9 While the Tapuya and enslaved Africans were treated differently by the Dutch, both groups were subject to oppressive control and considered expendable tools in the establishment of Dutch colonies in the Atlantic world. The revulsion experienced at the Mauritshuis to the Tapuya performance, particularly by those associated with the church, reflected Calvinist views on dance. According to John Calvin, those who engaged in dance acted “like stray beasts” and were under the influence of the devil. Further, Calvin regarded the songs that prompted people to dance as “an inticement to whoredome.”10 Considered within this system of belief regarding dance and song, it is unsurprising that spaces like the Mauritshuis have upheld certain silences. Silences both literal and symbolic: the restriction of aural engagement and the absence of overt discourses on the slave labor required to build the Mauritshuis. This silence also extends to the objects from Brazil that returned with Maurits, many of which were used as diplomatic gifts to advance his career.11 For example, the images of Frans Post, an artist who accompanied Maurits to Brazil, have traditionally been categorized as landscapes by art historians and museum collections. This landscape categorization, however, fails to address the violence and forced labor taking place behind the scenes to produce the quiet and calm scenes that Post is most known for painting during his time in Brazil. As art historian Micheal Gaudio has argued, when images such as Post’s are engaged through “an aural imagination,” they reveal the violent suppressions beneath the surface of the seeming tranquility of the canvas.12 557

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The Dutch occupation of Brazil was marked by countless examples of violence that were expunged from official narratives. We can recuperate some of these silences by turning to unofficial accounts that provide glimpses of the destruction and savagery of the colonial project under Maurits. Zacharias Wagener, a German quartermaster of the WIC, kept a small notebook, referred to as Thierbuch (Animal Book), containing images and accounts of his experiences in Brazil. In one of his entries, he refers to the Dutch capturing “powerful and safe cities, pillaging, devastating and destroying churches, monasteries and other fine buildings, with the rest being reduced to ashes.”13 This violence was geared not only to buildings and cities but also toward those who provided free labor on plantations. In another entry in Wagener’s notebook, he records the treatment of Africans, newly arrived on Brazilian shores. Wagener’s entry is worth quoting in its entirety as it provides a rare first-hand account of what transpired in Brazil. According to Wagener, She [a ship] brings at least 300 slaves. They are put ashore and driven into an old house and kept there till the day of the market. On that day the poor creatures, half starved and almost dying of thirst must creep like pigs or sheep out of their pens. Then they are led one by one (to make it easier to count them) to the market, where Portuguese and Dutch merchants look them over back and front to find if they are young or old, if they have scurvy, syphilis or any other grave diseases. A merchant picks out every eighth, tenth or so. After he has found them in good condition, he has to pay for a little girl of six or seven as much as for an older person. The price is two hundred Spanish reals a piece, which is three Groschen more than one RThl [Reichsthaler]. However, if a few of the merchants club together and toss for a mixed lot of forty, fifty or a hundred, they get them cheaper, and pay for them within a year.14 This description was accompanied by a watercolor image showing the newly arrived Africans emerging from a warehouse in Maurits’s capital city, Mauritsstad (present-day Recife; See Figure 43.2). Groups of unclothed African bodies are seen in unindividuated masses, while others are in the process of being inspected like animals by their potential owners. For example, in the left middle ground of the composition, a European man is shown touching and inspecting an African man who raises his arms above his head. The European man relies on both sight and touch to verify the physical capabilities of his prospective purchase. The health of the enslaved would have been an indication of their ability to endure the onerous labor that awaited them on plantations. Some figures are depicted crawling or laying on the ground, while others cower in fear as a raised stick is brandished by one of the traders. Wagener’s image is a unique visual source that does not remain mute about the violence of the colonial project, as seen with artists like Post and Eckhout. Instead, it makes evident the containment and commodification of the enslaved, who were treated much like animals, crawling, as Wagener notes, like “pigs and sheep out of their pens.” The commodity status of enslaved Africans is made even more explicit in another image in Wagener’s notebook of a woman and young child (see Figure 43.3). It has been posited that some of Wagener’s images, including that of the young woman and child, were directly based on Eckhout’s paintings.15 Wagener’s version, however, includes one detail not found on Eckhout’s canvas, namely a branding mark visible on the woman’s chest. The insignia of trading companies like the WIC, the initials of an ‘owner,’ or an abbreviation of the name of a plantation, would be applied to the body of an enslaved person, much like a farmer applying a brand to livestock. Branding enabled slaveholders to identify their ‘property’, 558

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Figure 43.2  Zacharias Wagener. Slave Market, ca. 1641. Watercolor on paper in Wagener’s ­Thierbuch. bpk Bildagentur/Kupferstichkabinett/Staatliche Kunstsammlungen/Dresden, ­Germany/Photo: Herbert Boswank/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 43.3  Zacharias Wagener. Molher Negra, ca. 1641. Watercolor on paper in Wagener’s ­Thierbuch. bpk Bildagentur/Kupferstichkabinett/Staatliche Kunstsammlungen/Dresden, ­Germany/Photo: Herbert Boswank/Art Resource, NY.

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especially in cases where the enslaved had escaped. To apply a branding, the skin of the enslaved person would be covered in oil prior to a hot iron being applied to the body. The wound would then be cleansed with lemon juice and gunpowder.16 One can only imagine the screams of pain of those forced to endure this most cruel procedure. These sounds of agony, like the sanitized landscapes of Post, have been stifled in the officially commissioned canvas of Eckhout, upon which Wagener’s image is likely based. The physical torture of this process would have also had a profound psychological impact on those forced to bear the letters or symbols of their oppressors. Like the act of touching the enslaved man’s body to ascertain suitability for work, as seen in the image of the slave market, the violent act of branding was another tactile means of asserting control over the bodies of the enslaved. Disfiguring the skin of an enslaved person with a branding iron would have been a violent rupture of this supposed protective boundary of the body. This treatment was often justified by the negative associations black skin could carry.17 The biblical story in which Noah punished his son Ham by making him serve his other sons was frequently used as a justification for human enslavement. According to some interpretations, Noah also turned Ham’s skin black as part of his punishment. Ham’s supposed destiny to serve his white brothers was, it was argued, a generational punishment that validated the subjugation of humans with darker skin pigmentation.18 For those not fully convinced of this biblical justification for enslaving humans, economic arguments were made, such as the one issued in a report by the WIC in 1639. It reminded of the necessity of slaves to the economic prosperity of colonies like Brazil and claimed that “if anyone finds himself conscious-stricken by this [enslavement of Africans], [these feelings] would merely be unnecessary scruples.”19 Black skin, in this conception, signified inferiority, defending the treatment of Africans like animals without the need for any misgivings. The pictured scar on the woman’s chest in Wagener’s diary brings us back, once again to Johan Maurits. Closer inspection reveals the intertwined letters I and M, located under the symbol of a crown. As Carolina Monteiro has recently demonstrated, this is the insignia of Johan Maurits, one that was used in documents and as a self-referential sign.20 It was included, for example, on a carved ivory chair that belonged to the count, to mark his possession of this valuable object. It can thus be surmised that Maurits himself may have owned the women depicted by Wagener and that he was compelled to place a mark of his ownership on the surface of her skin, as was done with his ivory chair. The fact that both the woman and ivory came from the same geographical location is noteworthy and will be explored further below. The insignia acted as a constant reminder of the commodity status of the enslaved woman who no longer had agency over her own body. The violent act of branding was likely not the only unwanted touch the enslaved woman was forced to endure. We know that seventeenth-century visitors to Mauritshuis were able to see and handle the many Brazilian items taken back to The Hague.21 It may be possible then, that the same opportunity to interact with all of Maurits’s possessions, which included the pictured woman, may have been extended to the 73 recorded European members of Maurits’s retinue as well as other visitors to his Brazilian residence. The loss of bodily authority was a reality for enslaved people through their forced relocation to the Americas, their use on plantations to perform grueling labor and, in many cases, their forced participation in unwanted sexual acts. The sexual availability of the depicted African woman is suggested in Wagener’s image through her representation with exposed breasts, as if available for consumption, much like the overflowing produce in the basket she holds. In the Dutch colonial system, an enslaved person was regarded in 560

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legal terms as property so they could not be disfigured, raped, or even murdered, nor did they possess any rights over their offspring.22 This context makes the image of the branded woman and what is presumably her young son, even more harrowing, as children could be sold and separated from their parents on the whim of a plantation owner. In contrast to the woman bearing the insignia of Maurits on her chest and depicted in a highly sexualized manner, Leocaria performance in the Golden Room of the Mauritshuis in 2019 was a symbolic assertion of her agency and bodily control. Leocaria danced in a space that would have been filled with objects owned by Maurits, many likely containing his personal insignia. Unlike her enslaved ancestors, who were treated as property and forcibly transplanted to the Dutch Atlantic to serve at the whims of their ‘owners,’ Leocaria’s routine signified a break from the shackles and perpetual threats of violence endured. Taking control over the movements of her own body, she reclaimed the Golden Room of the Mauritshuis, a space that would have been far from golden for the men and women bearing the branding mark of their owners upon the surface of their skins. The name of the space used for Leocaria’s performance at the Mauritshuis—the Golden Room—is noteworthy in our current discussion. The Golden Room, the grandest site in the Mauritshuis building, is one filled with elaborately gilded frames and decorative elements encrusted with gold leaf. As a result of a fire in 1704, we do not know exactly how this space would have looked when it was occupied by Maurits. We do know, however, that the original interior was filled with tropical hardwood and many of the walls were decorated with murals depicting Brazil. Maurits also used the upper floor of the house to display the art and objects he brought back with him to The Hague after his time as governor of Brazil. These included the aforementioned images by Post and Eckhout, as well as headdresses, gemstones, feathers, shells, spears, and stuffed animals. The presence of all these types of objects, coupled with the current name of the space, the Golden Room, redirects our attention to the coast of West Africa, the source of labor required for plantations and the other valuable commodities for the Dutch, such as gold and ivory. West Africa was the main source of ivory and gold for Europeans, and the name the Gold Coast signifies the particular importance attached to the latter. The so-called Gold Coast extended approximately from Axim in the west to the River Volta in the east.23 Until the end of the sixteenth century, European trade with the Gold Coast was dominated by the Portuguese, who had claimed a total monopoly on the region, largely based on a 1494 treaty promoted by the pope. Dutch sailors were the first to break this Portuguese monopoly, particularly because they did not feel any obligation to uphold the ­Roman ­Catholic-endorsed treaty.24 Trade with the Golden Coast opened up quickly, and by the year 1608, at least 200 Dutch vessels had made successful trading trips, taking back to the Netherlands almost 1,000 kilograms of gold a year.25 To ensure the continuation of the lucrative trade with the Gold Cost, increased efforts were made to formally supplant the Portuguese. This included the board of the WIC encouraging Johan Maurits to help back the efforts to ensure a stronger Dutch presence in Africa, thus supplying the desired commodities and labor to safeguard the prosperity of Brazil and, by extension, Dutch investors. Heeding this call, in 1637 Maurits sent a fleet of nine ships with a crew of 1,200 from Recife to the Gold Coast. The Dutch attempts were successful, and they managed to capture Elmina, a key trading site and castle that would serve as the Dutch administrative headquarters in West Africa until 1872. Following the victory over the Portuguese and capture of Elmina, Maurits wrote to the WIC directors to celebrate the achievement, 561

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which, he claimed, was only possible with the help of God.26 In Maurits’s view, his and the WIC’s increased access to gold and slave labor was a result of divine intervention. The continued reference to the grandest space in the Mauritshuis as the Golden Room reminds us of the many connections between Dutch Atlantic colonies like Brazil, the West African coast from which many enslaved men and women began the voyage to their new homes, and the Dutch Republic, that oversaw this transatlantic t­ riangle in the interest of financial gain. Our current discussion of gold also prompts reflection on an ongoing debate in the Netherlands regarding the frequent use of the descriptor ‘Golden Age’ (Gouden Eeuw) as a synonym for the seventeenth century. The term ‘Golden Age’ was first used by Pieter Lodewijk Muller to refer to the historical period between the years 1587 and 1713 and entered popular discourse in the nineteenth century when history was being used to evoke nationalistic pride. The “Golden Age” was intended to inspire a sense of unity through emphasis on the artistic achievements and unprecedented economic profits enjoyed by the geographically small but powerful Dutch during the long seventeenth century. The term became widely entrenched in both popular and academic discourse about the seventeenth century, so much so that it has influenced impressions of the period. Use of the moniker “golden” emphasizes the successes of the few, like Maurits, while suppressing the oppression and suffering of the many, such as Leocaria’s ancestors. In response to concerns over the exclusive and exclusionary meaning of such descriptors, in September 2019, the Amsterdam Museum publicly acknowledged the problems a­ ssociated with the term “Golden Age” and announced that it would no longer be using it in exhibitions and future programing. As Tom van der Molen, a curator at the Amsterdam Museum has noted, “Every generation and every person must be given the opportunity to tell his or her story about history and to interpret the stories told by others. But the debates about these issues require space – space for everyone.”27 It is precisely this reinterpretation and reinsertion of the absent stories from the hallowed spaces like the Golden Room in the Mauritshuis that makes Leocaria’s performance so relevant to how we may approach acts of decolonization. The shimmering gold must be tarnished and the sugar-coated histories of unending successes must not be the prevailing understanding of the seventeenth century. Another noteworthy component of Leocaria’s aptly named performance, Sugar Coated, and the way it eloquently bridges spaces, times, and people to reintroduce lost narratives, is that of the music accompanying her dance. Given the lack of personal accounts by the enslaved, it is necessary to consult new types of sources than those traditionally referenced by art historians. This will entail an expansion beyond written and material evidence, as enslaved men, women, and children were not officially allowed to have possessions on Dutch colonies. The few, usually utilitarian objects like clothing that the enslaved may have possessed, have not generally survived. Instead, histories and legacies would have been passed down orally, through stories, music, and dance. Singing and dancing, the very things Calvin viewed as beastly and linked to the devil, were often the only available means for the enslaved to preserve their traditions, vent their frustrations, offer comfort to each other, or as a means of resisting oppressive authority. The life of an enslaved person on a Dutch plantation would have been one filled with inconceivable hardships and despair. There were, however, short moments of respite from labor, usually on Sundays and after completion of the yearly harvest. During these times, the enslaved were able to come together to dance, sing, make music, and share their African 562

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Figure 43.4  Zacharias Wagener. Slave Dance, ca. 1641.  Watercolor on paper in Wagener’s Thierbuch. bpk Bildagentur/Kupferstichkabinett/Staatliche Kunstsammlungen/Dresden, Germany/Photo: Herbert Boswank/Art Resource, NY.

traditions with each other. Wagener once again provides us with a glimpse of one of these rare celebratory moments noting, When the slaves have done a week’s bitter drudgery, they are allowed to spend the Sunday as they like. They do this without fail with all kinds of grotesque hopping, drumming and whistling at certain places from morning till night. They dance untidily amongst themselves, men and women, old and young. Meanwhile others pass round a strong drink made with sugar, called garapa. Thus they spend the holy day in continuous dancing until they can hardly recognize one another under dust and filth.28 Wagener considers the actions of the enslaved in a negative light, in keeping with views on dance prevalent at the time. In the image accompanying this description, we see the socalled “grotesque” and “untidy” celebrations under way (see Figure 43.4). The depicted dance has been identified as an African calundú dance, highlighting the importance of these Sunday activities for the enslaved to maintain some link to their traditions.29 The rhythm of the music and motion of the swaying bodies evoked in Wagener’s Thierbuch transports us to the Golden Room as we focus on the music that keeps the beat for Leocaria’s movements. While we cannot capture the exact sounds of the Sunday festivities in seventeenthcentury Brazil, Leocaria’s performance provides a glimpse and link to some of the aural traditions that her enslaved ancestors were able to preserve over time. It also demonstrates the shared importance of music and song among descendants of enslaved Africans across vast geographical distances. The words, “Don’t want no sugar in my coffee/It makes me mean, Lord, it makes me mean” provided the lyrical backdrop to Leocaria’s performance. Quite obviously, these words draw attention to the many atrocities committed in the name of procuring sugar for 563

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European consumption and enjoyment. The lyrics echoing within the Sugar Palace were effective reminders of the cruelty endured by some to enable access to the sweetened cups of tea and coffee that became fashionable in Europe, thanks largely to plantations across the Atlantic world. The background music accompanying these lyrics also reminds us of the extended hardships, endured over multiple centuries, by descendants of the enslaved across the Americas. The music filling the usually silent walls of the Mauritshuis takes us finally, as a means of conclusion, to the so-called Parchman Farm, located in Mississippi, United States, during the twentieth century. Parchman Farm, formally known as the Mississippi State Penitentiary, was established in 1901 on the former Parchman Plantation and, in many ways, perpetuated the system of slavery endured by transplanted Africans and their descendants in the Americas.30 In 1947 and 1948, Alan Lomax, an ethnomusicologist, traveled to Parchman Farm and recorded the songs of the prisoners who were forced to perform arduous labor while incarcerated. The wood-cutting chants and field hollers of the prisoners were compiled by Lomax and released as “Negro Prison Songs.” One of the songs on this anthology, entitled Black Gal, provides the identical musical backdrop used in Sugar Coated. These chain or work gangs of prisoners who produced this music would be overlooked by armed guards, at the ready to punish for the slightest infraction. Much like their ancestors toiling under the watchful eye of the plantation owner, these Mississippi prisoners of African ancestry turned to song for comfort and as a means of keeping in time with each other as they worked. The use of song and music to keep rhythm was also a protective strategy as it helped prevent accusations of slower work which could result in punishment. Without access to musical instruments, the sound of the prisoner’s axes as they chop wood provides the drum-like beat to the song. The sound of axes working in unison reminds us of the generations of unpaid and backbreaking labor endured by Africans and their ancestors across the Americas, well into the twentieth century. Leocaria’s performance in the Golden Room at the Mauritshuis was a crucial step in expanding the types of histories and legacies that are deemed worthy of representation by cultural institutions. In the case of the Mauritshuis, it brought to the forefront some of the silences in the official histories about Maurits and his role in the Dutch colonial project. It highlighted the suffering and violence endured by the enslaved, all in the name of financial profit for Maurits and Dutch investors in the WIC. The unprecedented economic gains of the seventeenth century were achieved through the crushing unpaid and involuntary labor of enslaved men, women, and children, whose stories have been expunged from the goldcrusted walls of national institutions for far too long. To access these stories and histories, moving beyond an exclusive ocular emphasis allows us to consider the tactile and aural experiences of those not allowed to own property or record their own histories. The seventeenth century was a ‘Golden Age’ only for the few. The continued use of that term disregards the multiplicity of voices and experiences involved in trade networks and plantation culture that underpinned economic successes of the period. These voices range vast temporal periods and disparate geographical locations beyond the borders of the Netherlands. Spanning from the coast of West Africa, Brazil, and the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century and today, it also includes places like the United States, where the legacies of slavery and oral cultures endured as a mechanism of survival well into the twentieth century. As we reflect on the process of decolonizing the discipline of art history and institutions like museums that support our practice, we must continue to expand geographical boundaries, sources of knowledge and temporal categorizations, for more expansive and inclusive histories to be foregrounded. 564

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Notes 1 Leocaria first performed Sugar Coated at the Mauritshuis in November 2017 as part of Black Presence at the Sugar Palace, curated by The 21st Century Museum. Leocaria’s 2019 performance also coincided with a temporary exhibition, Shifting Image: In Search of Johan Maurits, on view from April 4 to July 7, 2019. This special exhibition was prompted by a heated public debate in the Netherlands about a decision to remove a statue of Johan Maurits from the foyer of the museum. For more on this debate, see: Sander van Walsum, “Buste van Johan Maurits verbannen naar het depot: slavernijdebat gaf de doorslag,” de Volkskrant, January 16, 2018; Janene Pieters, “Mauritshuis Offers Free Entry after Commotion over Namesake’s Bust,” January 22 2018; Gordon Darroch, “Dutch Museum Reopens Uneasy Debate about Colonial Legacy,” The Guardian, January 25, 2018; Karwan Fatah-Black, “Vasthouden aan koloniale nostalgie helpt niemand verder,” NRC Handelsblad, January 12, 2018; Lea van der Vinde, ed., Shifting Image: In Search of Johan Maurits (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2019). 2 The term ‘Sugar Palace’ was used by Johan Maurits himself, in a letter written to Constantijn Huygens, dated May 9, 1642, in reference to what others in the Netherlands were already calling his home in The Hague. 3 The Dutch involvement in the transatlantic slave trade continued until the nineteenth century and it has been estimated that Dutch ships carried more than half a million slaves from Africa. See: Michiel van Groesen, Introduction to The Expansion of Tolerance: Religion in Dutch Brazil (1624–1654) by Jonathan Isreal and Stuart B. Schwartz (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007); Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Piet Emmer, The Dutch Slave Trade (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005). 4 National Archives of the Netherlands, OWIC, 1.05.01.01, inv.no. 58, piece 206, April 1, 1643. 5 The WIC held a monopoly on all trade, including the trade of humans, west of the Cape of Good Hope. The WIC’s monopoly on the slave trade ended in 1730. For a detailed and convincing argument regarding Maurits’s personal involvement and profit from the trade of slaves, see: Carolina Monteiro and Erik Odegard, “Slavery at the Court of the ‘Humanist Prince’: Reexamining Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen and his Role in Slavery, Slave Trade and Slave-smuggling in Dutch Brazil,” Journal of Early American History 10 (2020): 3–32. 6 Junadry Leocaria, in Lea van de Vinde, ed. Shifting Image: In Search of Johan Maurits (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2019), 111. 7 This concept of “colonial agnosia,” as coined by Jodi Byrd, refers to the pervasiveness of colonialism that is not regarded as an extensive and constitutive living formation by those situated in complicity with colonial occupation. Jodi A, Byrd, “Fracturing Futurity: Colonial Agnosia and the Untimely Indigenous Present.” Lecture presented at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM. October 25, 2012. See also: Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein, “Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016): 1042–1054. 8 The objects Maurits brought back with him to the Netherlands and the artists who traveled with him to Brazil have been well-documented. See, for example: Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006); Quentin Buvelot et al. Albert Eckhout: A Dutch Artist in Brazil (Zwolle: Waanders, 2004); Mariana Françozo. De Olinda a Holanda: O Gabinete de Curiosidades de Nassau (São Paulo: Editora UNICAMP, 2014); Ernst van den Boogaart, Hans Hoetink, and Peter J. P. Whitehead, eds., Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1604–1679): A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil, Essays on the Occasion of the Tercentenary of his Death (The Hague: The Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichting, 1979); Alexander de Bruin, Frans Post: Animals in Brazil, trans. Marleen Ram (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2016); Cristina Ferrão and José Paulo Monteiro Soares, eds., Dutch Brazil (Rio de Janeiro and Petrópolis: Editora Index, 1997–2000). 9 For example, one eyewitness letter describing the Tapuya performance noted that “ceci a causé beaucoup de raillerie et risée parmi tous sorte de gens.” Quoted in C. R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 157. Another letter from Constantijn Huygens to David le Leu de Wilhem states, “Graaf Maurits heft wilden meegenomen, die dansen uitvoeren, terwijl zil geheel naakt zijn. De dominées, die er met hunne vrouwen naar waren gaan kijken, vonden dat niets aardig.” Quoted in J. A. Worp, ed., De briefwisseling van Constantijn Huygens, 1644–1649 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoof, 1957), 52.

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Anuradha Gobin 10 Sermons of Maister John Calvin Upon the Booke of Job, trans. Arthur Golding (London: Thomas Woodcocke, 1584), 373–373. Quoted in Ann Louise Wagner, Adversaries of Dance: From the Puritans to the Present (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 27. 11 See, for example: Carrie Anderson, “Material Mediators: Johan Maurits, Textiles, and the Art of Diplomatic Exchange,” Journal of Early Modern History, 20, no. 1 (January 2016): 63–85; Ellen O’Neil Rife, The Exotic Gift and the Art of the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic, PhD Dissertation, University of Kansas, 2013, especially 73–132. For a discussion of the afterlife of some of these gifted objects, see also: Michael Hatt, and Margit Thøfner, “Thinking Through Denmark: Connected Art Histories,” Art History 43, no. 2 (April 2020): 240–257. 12 Michael Gaudio, Sound, Image, Silence: Art and the Aural Imagination in the Atlantic World (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 33–62. 13 Zacharias Wagener, Thierbuch. Quoted in Cristina Ferrão and José Paulo Monteiro Soares, eds., Dutch Brazil, 181. 14 Zacharias Wagener, Thierbuch. Quoted in Otto H. Sphor. Zacharias Wagner: Second Commander of the Cape (Cape Town: A.A. Balkema, 1967), 71. 15 Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 134. 16 Eveline Sint Nicolaas, “Dutch Colonial Slavery,” in Slavery: The Story of João, Wally, Oopen, Paulus, Van Bengalen, Surapati, Sapali, Tula, Dirk and Lohkay, ed. Eveline Sint Nicolaas, Valika Smeulders et al. (Amsterdam and Antwerp: Rijksmuseum and Atlas Contact, 2021), 44. 17 For a more positive reading of how black skin was regarded, especially in terms of eighteenthcentury collecting practices, see: Rebecca Parker Brienen, “Embodying Race and Pleasure: Dirk Valkenburg’s ‘Slave Dance’,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (NKJ)/Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 58 (2007–2008), 242–264. 18 Eveline Sint Nicolaas, “Dutch Colonial Slavery,” in Slavery, 33. 19 National Archives of the Netherlands. OWIC, 1.05.01.01, inv. no. 53, fol. 22. 20 Carolina Monteiro, “Representations of Brazil and their Current Display at Western Museums: The Mauritshuis Case and the Dutch Gaze,” M.A Thesis. Leiden University, 2019. 18. 21 A 1644 letter from Adolph Vorstius to Constantijn Huygens written after visiting Johan Maurits’s collection in The Hague claims, “Everything we saw, handled and tasted at the hero’s home was delightful and pleasurable.” Quoted in Quentin Buvelot et al., Albert Eckhout: A Dutch Artist in Brazil (Zwolle: Waanders, 2004), 141. 22 Eveline Sint Nicolaas, “Dutch Colonial Slavery,” 28. 23 Kwame Yeboa Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast: 1600–1720: A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 21. 24 Gijs Van Der Ham, Tarnished Gold: Ghana and the Netherlands from 1593 (Amsterdam and Nijmegen: Rijksmuseum and Vantilt Publishers, 2016), 23. 25 Ibid., 39. This gold is estimated to have been worth over 1.2 million guilders, equivalent to over 17 million euros today. 26 Ibid., 45. 27 Tom van der Molen, The Problem of the ‘Golden Age’, CODART features, Curator’s Project. Curators of Dutch and Flemish Art (CODART) Website. November 2019. This initiative by the Amsterdam ­Museum, like the decision made by the Mauritshuis to remove a bust of Maurits from the museum’s foyer, has been the source of heated and ongoing public debates. For a summary of these, see, for example: Daniel Boffey, “End of the Golden Age: Dutch Museum Bans Term from Exhibit,” The Guardian, September 13, 2019; Nina Siegal. “A Dutch Golden Age? That’s Only Half the Story,” The New York Times, October 25, 2019. 28 Zacharias Wagener, Thierbuch. Quoted in Otto H. Sphor, Zacharias Wagner, 69. 29 James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 136. 30 It is beyond the scope of this current project to explore the history and foundation of Parchman Farm. For a detailed examination of the link between Parchman Farm and plantation slavery see, for example: David M. Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996); Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008).

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Selected Bibliography Carolina Monteiro. “Representations of Brazil and their Current Display at Western Museums: The Mauritshuis Case and the Dutch Gaze.” M.A Thesis. Leiden University, 2019. Carolina Monteiro and Erik Odegard. “Slavery at the Court of the ‘Humanist Prince’: Reexamining Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen and his Role in Slavery, Slave Trade and Slave-smuggling in Dutch Brazil.” Journal of Early American History 10 (2020): 3–32. Eveline Sint Nicolaas, Valika Smeulders et al., eds. Slavery: The Story of João, Wally, Oopen, Paulus, Van Bengalen, Surapati, Sapali, Tula, Dirk and Lohkay. Amsterdam and Antwerp: Rijksmuseum and Atlas Contact, 2021. Johannes Postma. The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Lea van der Vinde, ed. Shifting Image: In Search of Johan Maurits. Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2019. Michael Gaudio. Sound, Image, Silence: Art and the Aural Imagination in the Atlantic World. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Piet Emmer. The Dutch Slave Trade. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005. Rebecca Parker Brienen. Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.

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44 A PERSONAL TAKE, OR STUCK IN THE MIDDLE/SIDE AND GOING NOWHERE An Attempt at Imagining a Methodology for Engaging Colonial Photographic Archives, Histories, and Subjectivities George Mahashe The Narrative In my work, I am interested in the physical documents, not as a source of information or evidence, but as a disruption in time and personal proximity. In response, I engage the photographs through installations that bring the viewer into proximity with the photographic document, which in most cases has some degree of disavowal associated with colonialism and its gaze. The work plays with the boundary of observer (photographer and audience) and observed (subject and photographer), questioning the very impulse to police how the photographic residue of a past moment is to be perceived today. As with most people my age, my introduction to photography began on the other side of the camera, posing regularly in my Sunday best for the local roaming photographer, or caught off guard in a badly exposed candid photograph. Even today I still get embarrassed when I look through the many family albums that seem to capture every stage of my life in minute detail, from the double exposure image depicting a young me with my “twin” to the decorated page depicting an adolescent me emulating all the different TV stars of the time. The very formal graduation photographs hanging on my mother’s wall contrast those of me and my friends consuming our youth throughout the university years. (These I would never show to my mother.) During the same time, I was also exposed to my grandmother’s photo albums, reminiscent of a spread from glossy 1960s Vogue fashion magazines. I also regularly saw the popular airbrushed wedding portraits that hung in almost every house in my neighborhood. These, I later found out, were composites made from Identification photographs (used on official identity documents). I have even encountered some repurposed (enlarged and framed) family portraits at my grandmother’s family home that, I suspect, are conversion photographs taken by the resident German missionaries as part of their drive to publicize the good work they were doing for the kingdom of God, in exchange for funding.1 Image categories, such DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-50 568

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as those I have just described, might not have all been originally intended to be part of, or seen as objects associated with a contemporary African archive telling different stories.

The Journey While I cannot say exactly when I first encountered it, my awareness of the colonial photograph as such came much later in my engagement with photography. To contextualize my foray into colonial photographic archives, research, creative engagement, and my impending exit, let me first introduce my wider context as a photography-based image-maker. I began as an assistant to the local roaming photographer Mr. James Mthombeni, who in the 1980s had a steady clientele who scheduled their events around his availability. In my hometown Ga-Kgapane, near Bolobedu in the Limpopo province of South Africa, I knew more than a dozen professional roaming photographers. Like Mthombeni, they all operated in a highly competitive and profitable business. I got my first camera, a Fuji Powershot, at 11 (1993) and began producing photographs in the vein of the now canonized Mali photographer Malick Sidibé, as the roaming photographers before me had done. My awareness of, and interest in, professional photography was sparked by the popular magazines of the day (for example, Media24’s Directions), facilitated mainly by their pinup-style fashion spreads. In some instances, these “exotic” photographs were reminiscent of some daily scenes I often witnessed through my travels within rural Limpopo in northeastern South Africa, as my family visited other branches of our family across the ethnically divided apartheid-era Bantustans. Most importantly, they were indicative of a documentary impulse, still possible only in some corners of the world. Although fully integrated and in constant exchange with the contemporary world, these corners seem to  have  managed to perpetuate their own approach to contemporary life, despite the prevailing tendency towards uniformity, brought forth by the “civilizing” mission. At this point in my life (11–17 years old), my dream was to be a fashion photographer who travelled the continent, and the world, in search of exotic destinations, looking for the beautiful Somali and Nubian women whose photographs had begun to captivate my imagination. When I finished high school, I pursued commercial photography and went on to become a fashion photographer. Most influential in my work, during this period, was Irving Penn, a 1960s Vogue fashion and portrait photographer. What attracted me most to his work was his mastery of form and the lack of genre or focus, in a time when photographers specialized in specific areas of photography. Penn also made a large body of work that can be seen as ethnographic but, really, the only thing ethnographic about his photographs was the subject matter, or at least how they are perceived by Western systems of classification. Fashion photography is chameleonic in nature, and there is no photographic tendency or mode that has not been appropriated or assimilated by it. My interest in Penn and other photographers like him led to the difficulty I encountered with photographic genre when I attempted to register for a master’s program in photography. In my proposal I had identified the work and thought of Diane Arbus as a model for the direction I wanted to take. I was particularly inspired by her statement, I do feel I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things. I mean it’s very subtle and a little embarrassing to me, but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.2 569

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I had further identified the Balobedu people of Limpopo as my research interest for the Masters project and I wanted to document them in the spirit expressed by Arbus’s quote.3 The problem came with my use of the term “documentary.” My lecturers pointed out that if documentary were my interest, then Bruce Davison, the Farm Security Administration photographers or any of the other documentary greats, like Ernest Cole or Eugène Atget, would be a better-suited model to adopt. The issue lay with the prevailing definition of documentary photography as the act of documenting with the aim of drawing someone’s attention to a particular situation in order to effect change. I, on the other hand, was not interested in documenting for the sake of effecting a change. I was interested in the act of seeing Balobedu for myself. Seeing and comprehending that which I have not seen anywhere else, which someone outside of that place is not likely to see if I did not photograph it. I wanted to photograph Balobedu because, growing up, I was always fascinated by the old women and men that I encountered. I had often wondered where they were going, all dressed up in their colorful finery, in the opposite direction to the Lutheran church that most of us, uniformly dressed people, were heading to every Sunday. They fascinated me and I wanted to keep a piece of this enchantment. This matter of genre became an issue again, throughout my commercial career. The fashion-photography fraternity considered my work too “reportage,” while the photojournalism and documentary-photography fraternity felt that my work was too “fashionable,” so I did not fit in entirely on either side. This complication drew my attention to historic and anthropological photographs, where I later found some refuge from genre, driven largely by a move to foreground a cultural history of photography over its other histories (particularly that of documentary). To me, colonial photographs captured the randomness I often went to great lengths to create in my fashion shoots, as well as the attention to aesthetics and form I tried to impose on reportage assignments. Their appeal is further enhanced by the historic images’ objecthood, rooted in their production in the analog photographic tradition – a tradition that lends itself well to some rather spectacular aging qualities, expressed by the yellowing tones and the slight mirroring induced by oxidizing silver compounds in the emulsion, and the mold and scratches accumulated through handling. This makes the photographs even more visually engaging objects. This beauty is also expressed in the formal qualities of their compositions, testifying to a much longer history of image-making, which predated general photography or scientific photography. Even the anthropometric photograph, with its obvious association with racial sciences, had an aesthetic quality to it when considered independently of its production context. Because of this aesthetic quality, and the affinity it drew from most people within the specialized creative field (fashion photographers, designers, etc.), the historic photograph also circulated as decoration on textiles, designer utensils, and sometimes wallpaper. This was the case at Museum Africa, where some of Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin’s photographs from the twentieth century were on permanent display. In 2006, accepting the limitations of commercial photography, I decided to orient my photography in the direction of exhibition-making which, from a distance, appeared to allow more room to experiment with different approaches to photography. I first encountered the critical historic photograph through the work of Santu Mofokeng titled The Black Family Album: Look at me, which premiered as part of the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor. I also encountered Peter Engblom’s series on Mpunzi Shezi’s travels. The latter a fictionalized account of a Zulu missionary who travelled to Japan and brought back tantric sex to Zululand. Engblom’s work involved 570

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a composite of two albums found at a flea market. One album is from a missionary who was active in Zululand at the turn of the twentieth century; the other album was a form of Gentleman’s Relish (erotica) from the same period. I related to Mofokeng’s work from the point of view of reclaiming Black culture, and for its testament to Black pride, found in a then popular impulse of self-representation. At that time, I had just begun to read, Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like (1987), and V. Y. Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa (1998) all of which were advocating self-awareness and a move away from external validation and representation. As for Engblom’s work, I was fascinated by his use of a then new application of an old technique, spurred by digital photography and new editing software. Through Photoshop, Engblom had created a new, believable world by skillfully compositing two contrasting historic photographic genres, to make a new, thought-provoking ­image, which he accompanied with an elaborate tale of adventure and boundary crossing. I later understood that he simultaneously told the story of colonialism, and of the subjectivities of the colonized and their efforts to counter this colonization, without taking either party too seriously.

The First Critique My first impulse, in my quest to make an exhibition, was to find the right equipment. I ­settled on a large-format camera, one of those old-style cameras with which you view the scene being photographed upside down on ground glass, with a cloth over your head. For film I chose expired Polaroid Type 55, an instant film that produced both a 4 × 5 inch print and negative simultaneously. The production of the print and negative meant I kept the negative for myself and gave the print to the people I photographed, as a way of address the often-asked question “What do I get out of it?” or the casual “Why take a picture if I will never see it again?” In addition to the ease and convenience, the chemistry from the polaroid’s mechanical development process sometimes left dust marks and streaks on the print as well as on the edges of the negative, giving it a similar effect to old-style photographs (glass negatives). This instantly applies to an unmistakably contemporary scene what may appear to be the effect of years in storage without editing digital software. I then spent the better part of 2006 and 2007 driving around Limpopo’s Venda, Giyani, ­Polokwane, and Bolobedu areas retracing my childhood travels. I photographed people that best captured my memory of childhood encounters, without omitting the quirks of contemporary life like cell phones and other repurposed/remixed contemporary items. I used these photographs to lobby for exhibition space and funding for an exhibition entitled Gae Lebowa. When I approached then the contemporary art curator Khwezi Gule, of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), he indicated he was reluctant to take on the proposed exhibition, citing the lack of criticality in my handling of my photographic genre’s history and complicity with colonialism. In so doing he alerted me to the problem of producing images, without dealing with the discourse around them. He then pointed me in the direction of the debates raised around the politics of the gaze, popularized by the work of Okwui Enwezor in publications such as In/sight (1996). Gule then passed me on to the Curator for Traditional Southern African Collections (Nessa Leibhammer), where the photographic series would be in a more appropriate conversation, referring to what I later understood to be institutional critique. Leibhammer elaborated on the concerns that had been raised by Gule, citing the problems produced by anthropology’s abuse of power 571

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in its formative years. Leibhammer’s elaboration put into context the issues I had been introduced to in Mofokeng’s work (1999), without fully grasping their consequence. These issues included the manipulation of research “data” (including photographs) to establish authority and support a claim to an expert position, at the expense of other contrasting views and understandings derived from the same “data,” just without the academic authority. While there was an awareness of a problem, these curators could not adequately explain to me what the problem with ethnographic photographs was. My images were portraits of people I encountered, most of whom wore items of clothing generally misclassified as traditional garments, due to the way they were packaged by a 1990s school of South African academics, who sought to collect and catalogue a variety of historic and contemporary Black South Africans’ material culture and art for inclusion in their museum collections, in the wake of South Africa’s de-racialization. This critique and classification of my work, somewhat accurate and reflecting my ignorance of contemporary discourse, discounted an interest in photography itself, as opposed to its classification or use. This discounting can be seen as a result of the prevalence of a discourse that had increasingly become dependent on historians and theorists and less on the practitioners of photography, a move brought on by the maturation of the contemporary/conceptual artist’s use of photography. A key contention was with images like Molobedu whose photographic technique is reminiscent of late nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs where all signs of modernity are deliberately omitted, which was not the case with the photograph (Figure 44.1). My approach, resorting to photographic technique as the basis of my photographic practice, was brought on by my training as a commercial photographer with minimal visual discourse training. But it also fell within a trend I later found elaborated by Abigail Solomon-Godeau in a blog published by Fotomuseum Winterthur.4 Through her blog entry I came to understand this move as a tendency by photography practitioners to react to the complexities brought on by the end of photographic genre boundaries, as a criterion for distinguishing oneself as a photographer, as well as an attempt at maintaining a single definition of photography. This tendency manifests itself in the practitioner either resorting to a pre-digital impulse, where photography is distinguished by mastery of the classic photography techniques, as I had done or by aligning the practice of photography with other media (pre- and post-digital) used as a component within more complex exhibition strategies, such as installation. Other approaches can also be seen through the pairing of photography with discourse through activism, such as in Zanele Muholi’s series Faces and Phases, which can be seen as an archive. As my awareness of photography’s relationship with anthropology, ethnography, and archive grew, particularly within the South African context, I realized that there were no ethnographic photographs of Balobedu circulating in contemporary public life. DugganCronin, who presented a comprehensive but idealized photographic survey of South African “tribes” in the twentieth century, did not have a corpus on Balobedu.5 Other visual references were in the form of speculation on the website, Ezakwantu suggesting that one of Duggan-Cronin’s photographs, labelled as Pedi, was probably a photograph of a Lobedu girl.6 This relied on a juxtaposition of two photographs comparing the neckpiece worn by the girl and a photograph of a set of beads collected in Bolobedu. It was only after a chance encounter and conversation with Jeremane Makwala, a Northern Sotho author and retired academic, who pointed me in the direction of research related to the publication, The Realm of a Rain-Queen, that I began to find historic photographic references to Balobedu.7 572

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Figure 44.1  George Mahashe, Molobedu, 2010. From the photographic series, Gae Lebowa. Courtesy of the artist.

Gae Lebowa Exhibition, 2010 Having secured an exhibition space at the JAG, I began shooting the second leg of the Gae Lebowa project in 2009. I had spent the two years getting acquainted with the issues 573

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surrounding ethnographic photography, using The Colonizing Camera and Images from Bamum as my main sources, while trying to find a solution to the uneasy link between my work and ethnography or to articulate the reprieve my work offers to ethnography.8 Mentors like photographers Victor Matom suggested I explore color photography as a way of limiting the undesired association with anthropology. Other interventions included identifying the sitters by name to manage the anonymity of the “observed other.” As the opening drew near, I grew dissatisfied with the arguments presented by the critiques of ethnographic photography. I went on to present the exhibition using a limited number of the blackand-white photographs, presented in a separate room with contextualizing wall text and a video piece, foregrounding my insider position as a Molobedu. The color photographs were presented in an adjoining room with only captions as a source of information. While this alleviated some of the anxieties I felt, it drew me further from photography, towards multimedia installations as the governing principles became more about curating the discourses around photographic genre than about presenting a photographic series.

Getting into the Archive, a Room Filled with Disavowal Through the process of attempting to create a photographic exhibition, and in my quest for the colonial era photographic archive of Balobedu, I often encountered fear and avoidance from people who saw anything related to the project of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury colonialism as if it were the plague. The basis of disavowal has less to do with whether something is disavowed or not, but rather with the association with something that has been declared taboo. This disavowal is mainly advanced by some Africanist and liberal activist academics who, drawing from some responses and waves of critique from “Indigenous communities” against some academics’ use of archival material, maintain that the repeated reproduction of such photographs perpetuates the exploitation typical of the moment of their production – the use of photography to legitimize colonialism. This argument has resulted in nervousness about handling, reproducing, and exhibiting historic photographs from this particular colonial period. To counter this disavowal, I had to first get in contact with the archive. After finding out about anthropologists E. J. and J. D. Krige’s The Realm of a Rain-Queen, I collected several stories about the couple, who spent the better part of the 1930s in Bolobedu.9 While I enjoyed the pictures in their book, I wanted to find the source of these pictures. I became obsessed with the idea of the original image, the negative, to see what the anthropologist had left out. The search first led me to Museum Africa, where I found some images from the Krige monograph, most of which were attributed to Duggan-Cronin. A few weeks of looking in the various Wits archives led to a conversation with Professor Anitra Nettleton, then working towards the Wits Art Museum, who confirmed that Wits had some images by Krige. Upon finding them, I was disappointed to find that they were cropped photographic prints mounted on annotated cards. Numerous conversations with other people riding the archive fever wave led me to Davison, whose book Lobedu Material Culture compared Lobedu material culture from the 1930s with that of the 1980s, using her own as well as the Krige photographs.10 I visited Davison in Cape Town, who confirmed that the entire photographic collection of the Krige 1930s fieldwork from Bolobedu was held by Iziko Museums. She also informed me that the collection was in storage awaiting transportation to the Social History Centre. I leant that this move was to separate the collection of “non-­Europeans” from the natural history collections, where they had previously been positioned. 574

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Davison expressed an interest in picking up her Lobedu research when she retired, the following year, and asked me to join her as an interlocutor. I expressed an interest in taking up the research independently and was informed that the collection was not yet established as a public resource. It existed as a complement to another archive of Lobedu material culture. To access it, I would have to be a bona fide researcher or affiliated with a recognized institution. I complied, enrolling in a graduate program, and returned in the next year to begin working through the photographic collection. My training in commercial photography, instead of the social sciences, history, or photo conservation, meant that I was not equipped with the methodological expertise required to formally constitute the collection as a standard archive by writing its history and cataloguing it in preparation for public access. My interest in the collection’s photographic materiality, on the other hand, meant that I was better suited for a different kind of engagement, one that would constitute the collection as an archive through my use of it as a basis for an art intervention. Because the collection was neither accessioned nor constituted as an archive, with stipulated regimes of custody and care, my access was subject to being overseen by Davison. Questions around digitization were blocked by the institutional boundaries as well as by copyrights issues, so I began to engage the collection as analogue photographs, working in the darkroom for two years while I pored over countless debates around anthropology and photography. As with the Gae Lebowa (2010) exhibition, the debate did not hold sway for me. The Gae Lebowa exhibition had been installed by a Lobedu man on the staff at the JAG. Excited by the exhibition, he invited Mr. Malatji, an acquaintance whom he introduced as being well versed in Khelobedu, to talk to me. During our many conversations –­ spanning myth, contemporary Lobedu culture, and some rather sharp criticism of the academic ­project – the Malatji presented me with a list of items that I would need if I were to successfully elicit information from a Lobedu elder. I had no idea what most of these ‘objects’ were. I asked my grandparents, and still I could not grasp what they were. Later, while going through Davison’s (1984) book on Lobedu material culture, my grandmother pointed to an item in the book and identified it as one of the items I had enquired about. She proceeded to tell me about its significance. I had taken The Realm of a Rain-Queen to Bolobedu but had not yet recognized what showing the plates in the monograph to people could do and had been doing.11 This interaction revealed to me the photographs’ potential as a mode for facilitating oral traditions. I proceeded to take both books with me whenever I visited Bolobedu. There, the Krige book’s authority was indisputable; most people knew about it and had many stories to recount about its authors. Even the most critical challengers expressed sadness that such work was not undertaken anymore. When I took my own photographs to Bolobedu, they were met with the same enthusiasm as had been shown for the Kriges’ monograph. Many people urged me to take up the work started by the Kriges, so that the next generation could perhaps get a glimpse of Khelobedu as photographs, emphasizing that it is important for such things to be done by insiders, as opposed to the fly-by-night researchers that come for a weekend and expect to write a book about Balobedu. This referred to the many writers, photographers, journalists, and researchers who have been flocking to Bolobedu to mine the myth of a Rain-Queen. In thinking about the idea of the fly-by-night researcher and what I later observed as a tendency to understand the place which you spend most time in, I began to see a pattern brought by my location in the city, being away from Bolobedu. This dislocation influences how one perceives and understands Bolobedu and, in turn, how 575

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one represents it, a position a Lobedu insider is shielded from by default. It further raised questions about the 1930s ethnography project, and the effect the process of conducting long-term field research had on the anthropologists, even if their final published products did not always accommodate the effects of their experience of the field site. I came to understand that the implied archive, drawn from years in the field, was the basis for the Kriges’ canonization in Bolobedu; a canonization which ran contrary to most “critical” thinking associated with contemporary attitudes to researching twentieth-century anthropologists. It is indisputable that some communities consider the ethnographic photographic object as suspect. But I now know that this was not the case for many people in Bolobedu. Indeed, most did not feel this disavowal. As I immersed myself in my Lobedu respondents’ positions on the Krige materials, I began to try to understand the structures of feeling and thinking that had enabled them to come to terms with them. It seemed to me that they had, so to speak, done their rituals, purifying the Krige materials for Bolobedu’s purpose, thereby allowing them to function as productive discourse. It was then that I began to realize that it was the academics who had not come to terms with the disavowed status of the ethnographic photographic objects. On the face of it, theirs seemed to be the informed position, in contrast to my apparently naïve Bolobedu respondents. Their ability to judge is based on their academic understanding of how colonial, and later apartheid, power functioned. But my Lobedu respondents are far from innocent of knowledge of how such power operated. Nor are they unaware of the effects of the colonial and apartheid archives on their lives. My respondents are also aware of their own power, as well as the fluidity of archival or documentary material and have, over time, manipulated it to their benefit. Was it the case that the academics, confident as they are of their academic authority and academic ways of thinking, were failing to recognize other forms of authority, and other ways of thinking about problematic inheritances, which exist simultaneously with theirs? Is it because of this confidence that they have not moved beyond the ethnographic photographic archive’s immediate consequences? The question of the archive as disavowed then emerged as a problem unique to contemporary academics and, in turn, their students, brought on by their own processes and rituals, tailored to legitimize their existence.

“Defending” Ethnographic Photography While working on the Krige collection, I was invited to see the Siliva Zulu – Silent Pictures, Telling Stories12 exhibition with its curators. The exhibition presented the film Siliva the Zulu13 among some ethnographic photographs taken during the making of the film and some material culture of both “the Zulu” (clothing and war technology) and the anthropologist (cameras and safari clothing) from that period. I eventually got into a conversation where I found myself defending the anthropologist Lido Cipriani, who produced the ethnographic photographs on display. Because the curators had spent the better part of the written presentation trying to contextualize the anthropologist’s career as a fascist conspirator who created racial photographs, they failed to explore his earlier experiments in ethnography, working at the cusp of anthropology’s move from a colonial pioneer’s hobby and alibi, into a professional discipline. This had essentially entailed a move from anthropometry – the photographs as evidence in the service of racial sciences – towards ethnographic photography – the use of the camera as an unguarded note-taking device, creating archives as opposed to creating definitive knowledge meant to effect a change.14 This idea of ethnographic photography being about creating an archive, as opposed to creating 576

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definitive contemporary knowledge, emphasizes the distinction between creating a photograph for immediate evidentiary use (such as in a documentary) in support of a contemporary theory or cause and creating a photograph for future reference and re-examination of past assumptions. I defended the ethnographic photographs and the photographer because, with all the literature that existed on the complexity of photography’s and anthropology’s relationship, I still sensed fear and a unilateral approach to the issues. People were so invested in the process of self-hating for the sins perpetrated by their forefathers that they were only interested in focusing on one aspect of colonial or scientific photography at the expense of all the other uses and the associated photographic histories. For me, it pointed out that the impulse to be reflexive, and indeed critical of oneself, was being achieved at the expense of logic and an understanding of the interconnectedness and entanglement of the actors involved in the production of these archival documents (the photograph in this case). I went on to co-write a review of the exhibition as well as to act as a respondent with the Siliva Zulu exhibition curators in a seminar visit, where some African Studies students came to see and talk about the problematics of the exhibition. Throughout the seminar visit, I managed to challenge the assumptions coming from the African Studies position, based to a degree on the premise that the colonial project and its archives were a perpetuation of thinking proposing that one person is superior to others which gives them the right to represent and collect the other. While this position is, to some degree, true, it was launched from a position that judged fault based on association rather than by actual action. The seminar visit ended with a provocation by Nick Shephard (associate professor in African Studies) pointing out that, even if I could challenge their position, I couldn’t deny the fact that it was all (colonial archives-photographs) fueled by desire, a desire to possess the other. In my naïve state, I had crossed this boundary that the not-so-naïve person would have avoided. After this encounter, I moved to create the installation Dithugula tša Malefokana (2012– 2016) using the Krige negatives, setting them up as Lobedu ritual objects, instead of as colonial objects, mainly based on some of the strategies I had observed from my Lobedu respondents’ attitudes to problematic inheritances. I had observed that the response to the suspect state of the ethnographic photograph had been to “ban” the photographs from public circulation. Activist academics attacked institutions that put up such images, using the discourse of reflexivity to intimidate them into compliance. Although the images were effectively banned, the very same academics continued to circulate the photographs through networks of journal papers and critical publications. This left the public ignorant of the nature of the “objects”, depriving them of the opportunity to form their own opinions. This exclusion left the domain open for the academics’ opinions to triumph unchallenged, replicating the conditions for the abuse by the twentieth-century expert; the very expert opinion that was used as an alibi to perpetuate gross injustice. The photographic “objects” became illustrations and were stripped of their objecthood as photographs, capable of mediating multiple meanings and points of access. Somehow, to these academics, this state of the photograph as illustration muted the disavowal that forced them to want to prevent the images from circulating publicly. Perhaps their objecthood was the problem; a theory is easy to entertain, while the real thing is not so easy. The Dithugula tša Malefokana installation comprised an immersion into a compromised photographic darkroom installed within the gallery space, where the audience is invited to develop a random pre-exposed 577

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Figure 44.2  George Mahashe, K519, 2012.  Exhibition residue from the exhibition Dithugula tša Malefokana. Courtesy of the artist.

photograph in the provided developer, without any means for fixing the image, leading to a fogged and sometimes solarized photograph depicting aspect of life in Bolobedu in the 1930s (Figure 44.2). With this concern, I used the Dithugula tša Malefokana installation’s iterations to present the 1940s photographic images to a wider public, included academics associated with the University of Cape Town art school (2012); high school learners from three schools in Bolobedu at Masalanabo High (2015); as well as exhibiting at an independent art space Parking Gallery (2012) in Johannesburg; and the tenth Bamako Encounters, African Biennale of Photography (2015). With these different iterations, the aim was not so much to show the contents of these photographs but rather to get the audience to see the object as something more than a document to be read. I had hoped that in the uncontrolled mess of handling an uncaptioned, wet, and light sensitive object, they would struggle to look at it and read it as if it were a document, or the least, look at it as a different kind of document of their making. More than that, I had hoped to get them to touch the photographic document, instead of having them gaze at it from a distance with the safety of a caption and some glass, as the photograph hides behind a frame. Within this spirit, when the project was presented at Masalanabo High School near where some of the photographs had been made, many students used their mobile phones to rephotograph the images further entrenching the historic images into contemporary circulation beyond the academy (Figure 44.3). 578

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Figure 44.3  George Mahashe, Dithugula tša Malefokana, 2015. Public engagement during the culmination of the Gae Lebowa Fieldworks workshops, Bolobedu, South Africa. Courtesy of the artist.

Exits By way of an exit, or a conclusion of some sort. This chapter has taken us through some meanderings as I moved towards some semblance of an understanding of photography and indeed the photographic – that open-ended event – as an entangled image event convening many subjectivities across time. All vying for some refuge against the weight of the photograph. That 1839 invention that made colonialism imaginable, or even “successful” if you concede to the photograph as fixed, let alone capable of fixing a moment in time. It is a summative exercise establishing the background for my PhD component MaBareBare.15 My intention with the project discussed and its successors is merely to attempt. To go, to see … .

Author’s Note This work is based on research supported by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Notes 1 Photographs depicting newly converted Christians, see Geary‘s ‘Introduction: Views on Postcards’ in C. M Geary and V. Webb, eds., Delivering Views, Distant Cultures in Early Post Cards (Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1998), 1–12 for an explication of the term. 2 B. Govignon, ed., G. Edwards, N. Elliott, E. Nash, and M. Stevens, trans., The Abrams Encyclopedia of Photography (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004).

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George Mahashe 3 Balobedu are a group or federation of people, not necessarily defined by race, kin or tribe, but by a form of complex political and social affiliation, centered on the office of a sacred Rainmaker. Today, they occupy a territory commonly referred to as Bolobedu, which is a section of the northeastern part of the Limpopo province of South Africa. 4 Two Radically Disjunct Approaches by Abigail Solomon-Godeau Published: 15. April 2014. available: http://blog.fotomuseum.ch/2014/04/1-two-radically-disjunct-approaches/#more-1868 5 The only mention of Balobedu in his monographs was in a general comment by W. Eiselen (1931) in the introduction to Duggan-Cronin’s monograph on the Pedi, designating Balobedu (mainly referring to the language) as an inconsequential group that would be absorbed into the Bapedi. 6 http://www.ezakwantu.com/Tribes%20-%20Ba%20Pedi%20-%20Bapedi%20-%20Northern%20Basotho.htm 7 Krige and Krige (1980[1943]). 8 Hartmann et al., 1998 and Geary, 1988. 9 J. D. Krige and E. J. Krige, The Realm of a Rain-Queen – A Study of the Pattern of Lovedu Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 [1943]). 10 P. J. Davison, “Lobedu Material Culture: A Comparative Study of the 1930s and 1940s,” Annals of the South African Museum 94, no. 3 (1984): 41–201. 11 Krige and Krige, 1943. 12 Siliva Zulu – Silent Pictures, Telling Stories. January 01, 2013– December 31, 2013. Iziko Slave Lodge, Cape Town. 13 Siliva the Zulu is a film shot in 1927 by the film director and Italian explorer Attilio Gatti in Zululand (see http://www.iicbelgrado.esteri.it/IIC_Pretoria/webform/SchedaEvento.aspx?id=121). 14 See Christopher Pinney’s, Photography and Anthropology (London: Reaktion Books 2011) for an explication of the move from anthropometry to ethnography. 15 Mahashe, PhD dissertation, 2019.

Selected Bibliography Biko, S. B. I Write What I Like. Sandton: Heinemann Publishers, 1987. Davison, P. J. “Lobedu Material Culture: A Comparative Study of the 1930s and 1940s.” Annals of the South African Museum 94 (3) (1984): 41–201. Eiselen, W. “The Suto-Chuana tribes: Sub Group II, The Bapedi (Transvaal Basotho),” 33–49. In A. Duggan-Cronin, ed., The Bantu Tribes of South Africa – Reproductions of Photographic Studies, Vol. II, Section II. Cambridge: Deighton, Bell & Co., 1931. Enwezor, O., Bell, C., Zaya, O. & Oguibe, O. In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1996. Fanon, F. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press 6, 2004. Geary, C. M. Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya, Cameroon, West Africa, 1902–1915. Washington, DC: Institute Press, 1988. Geary, C. M. & Webb, V. (eds.) Delivering Views, Distant Cultures in Early Post Cards. Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1998. Govignon, B., ed. Edwards, G., Elliott, N., Nash, E. & Stevens, M., trans. The Abrams Encyclopedia of Photography. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2004. Hartmann, W., Silvester, J. & Hayes, P., eds. The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1998. Krige, J. D. & Krige, E. J. The Realm of a Rain-Queen: A Study of the Pattern of Lovedu Society. 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1980 [1943]. Mahashe, T. G. ‘MaBareBare, a Rumour of a Dream’. Presented as part of MaBareBare, An expression of Khelobedu in the Present. PhD thesis. Cape Town: University of Cape Town. (2019.) Available: https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/handle/11427/30544/thesis_hum_2019_mahashe_tebogo. pdf?sequence=6&is Allowed=y Mofokeng, S. “The Black Photo Album.” 68−75. In P. M. Saint Léon, ed., Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography. 1st English ed. Paris: Revue Noire, 1999. Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. Pinney, C. Photography and Anthropology. London: Reaktion Books, 2011.

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Afterword

45 TOWARDS A COMBATIVE DECOLONIAL AESTHETICS Nelson Maldonado-Torres

At the conclusion of a volume on decolonizing art history, it seems important to return to a question posed by the New York City-based decolonial umbrella organization and movement Decolonize This Place (DTP). In their “Decolonial Operations Manual,” which includes an overview of their actions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History, they ask: “How will the interest of the artworld in decolonization turn this into lasting material commitment?”1 Related to this question, one may ask, what is it that established museums, galleries, art schools, and departments of art history understand by decolonization, if they have an interest in it at all? The attention from hegemonic institutions and traditional art venues to decolonization is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it can open-up new spaces for reflection and study of decolonization, thereby exposing new publics and generations to the challenge of questions about settler colonialism and coloniality, while on the other, it may lead to a certain commodification of the idea of decolonization, as it is converted into primarily a research theme or an object of curation. In this process, the meaning of decolonization and the decolonial are reduced to the measure of the work and actions of the privileged subjects in institutions like museums and universities: the professional curator and the scholar. Severed from grassroots movements that advance decolonization, the meaning of decolonization is made to adjust to the horizon of possibilities and ethos of the modern/colonial liberal arts and sciences, and decolonization becomes an area of specialization rather than an imperative that challenges the very definition and practice of being a curator, an artist, or a scholar. Different from liberal projects of tolerance, critique, diversity, and inclusion, decolonization, Frantz Fanon taught us, “sets out to change the order of the world,” and it “never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamentally alters being.”2 If being is understood, at least in part, in relation to everything that appears to sensing beings within any given configuration of space and time, and art reinforces or challenges modes of sensing as well as spatio-temporal orders through visual, tactile, tasting, olfactory, and aural means, then it must be considered that art plays a key role in the maintenance or alteration of being.3 Decolonization, therefore, cannot dispense with what has come to be known as art in decolonial collectives and related movements, communities, and organizations. By virtue of its potential creative disruptions and challenges, art can also generate questions and become 583

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an extension, if not a quintessential expression, of the questioning and creative body/subject and collectives in the process of decolonization. At the same time, however, art can be made and has been made into a treasured commodity, industry, and discourse in the composition and workings of modernity/coloniality. Increasingly, since its early formation in the European Renaissance and the invention of a civilized Europe in face of presumed barbarians, savages, and natural slaves in the Americas, Africa, and other parts of the globe, Western modernity instills the desire to assimilate into its standards of rationality, ethics, beauty, and socio-political organization.4 Institutions such as the modern nation-state, the modern research university, art schools, and museums have played major roles in the erasure and colonization of views that do not conform to this project, particularly those that originate outside Europe and in places dominated by a majority of settlers of European origin. Particularly after the seventeenth century, within this same discourse of Western modernity, art is considered to be intrinsically connected with beauty and refinement, while modernity conceives itself as the home of the highest forms of both.5 In modernity, true art is supposed to be sought for, protected, and cultivated. It has the power to make those who create it or who appreciate it appear as more modern and more civilized than otherwise. These various imperatives shape modern institutions and projects, and they make themselves palpable in the hegemonic forms of art schools, art education, museums, galleries, as well as art history textbooks. These various spaces and materials come to constitute a modern/colonial artistic industrial complex, which subordinates art to skewed ideas of civilization and to the goals of a wide network of institutions and practices that serve in function of coloniality. The concept “art” carries the trace of this history and role, which makes evident that decolonizing art and decolonizing art history is not a simple or an easy affair. Walter Mignolo frequently indicates that the discourse on decoloniality seeks to change the terms of the conversation, rather than only the content.6 This idea goes in the direction of challenging the expectation of assimilation into the conceptualization and methodologies of existing scholarly disciplines and aesthetic production. If we follow Fanon, changing the terms of the conversation arguably requires changing the practices through which conversations are produced, which involves challenging the idea that conversations are to be led or guided by presumed experts through the standard means of scholarly and artistic creation, curation, and dissemination. How, then, to change the terms of the conversation and do so as part of the project of changing the order of the world and altering being? How to avoid the seduction of inclusion and assimilation—even when we think that we are escaping them? These questions about framing and reframing are at the center of the Strike MoMA campaign launched by the Strike MoMA Working Group of the International Imagination of Anti-National Anti-Imperalist Feelings (IIAAF) (Figure 45.1). The IIAAF is an outgrowth of the work of organizations that came together multiple times in roughly the last decade to organize actions against settler colonial and racist initiatives and projects in various New York City museums. Much of this work is documented in DTP’s “Decolonial Operations Manual,” which insists on the importance of “internationalism against borders,” and the struggle against the combined forces of imperialism and nationalism. The text refers to the “social and environmental devastation wrought by imperialism” and the “drawing of colonial state borders,” which help to explain the existence of “so many diasporas in Europe and North America.” A particularly sinister and “vicious circle” of sorts becomes evident in recent years when white nationalists have mobilized very visibly against what they take to be a “re-peopling” qua “replacement” of the white population in these contexts. 584

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Figure 45.1  Protesters during a “Strike MoMA” action in midtown Manhattan on June 11, 2021. Hyperallergic / Hakim Bishara. Originally published in the article by Hakim Bishara, “Strike MoMA Announces Phase 2 of Protests,” Hyperallergic June 11, 2021, https:// hyperallergic.com/675618/strike-moma-announces-phase-2-of-protests/.

Imperialism abroad and an increasingly violent nationalism within the states to which colonized subjects have been forced to migrate—but not only—combine to define the terms of a hell from which there seems to be no escape. The “Decolonial Operations Manual” elegantly explains what is at stake and what might be necessary to counter the combined forces of imperialism and nationalism: As the ideological seams of empire are torn apart and settler democracy melts down before our eyes, we aim to kindle an International Imagination of Anti-National and Anti-Imperialist Feelings (IIAAF) that shares colonial wounds but is driven by freedom dreams, from Puerto Rico to Punjab, Palestine to Turtle Island. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City undoubtedly represents a monumental celebration of modernity. Its criteria for selection, internal organization, and operation are major references to other museums around the globe. Building on an entire decade of oppositions to settler colonialism and coloniality in places like New York City and Palestine, organizations and projects such as MTL+ and DTP, among various others, joined forces in the formation of the IIAAF and took MoMA to task (Figure 45.2).7 The backdrop included reports of various ties, including a payment of $158 million, between 585

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Figure 45.2  Over 300 activists staged a teach-in at the entrance of MoMA on May 21, 2021. ­Hyperallergic / Hrag Vartanian. Originally published in the article by Hakim Bishara, “300+ Activists Blockade Entrance of MoMA, Condemning Ties to Violence Against Palestinians,” Hyperallergic May 21, 2021, https://hyperallergic.com/647786/ activists- blockade-entrance-moma-ties-to-violence-against-palestinians/.

the Chairman of MoMA, the billionaire Leon Black, and the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and a second major wave of Black Lives Matter protests as well as the COVID-19 pandemic in the summer of 2020. The IIAAF document “Strike MoMA: Framework and Terms for Struggle” includes a section with “The Case Against MoMA,” which starts with references to oppositions to Leon Black and the expectation of his resignation and quickly turns to larger issues: “Whether Black stays or goes, a consensus has emerged: beyond any one board member, MoMA itself is the problem.”8 The strike provides major insights into the meaning and mode of operation of a non-extractivist and combative decolonial aesthetics that can successfully escape or at least mitigate and provide a path away from the coloniality of the liberal arts and sciences, hegemonic art education, art history, and curation. The Strike MoMA campaign combines the frameworks of decolonization, abolition, anticapitalism, anti-imperialism, and the critique of patriarchy in the effort to de-­exceptionalize the museum and expose both, its typical modern/colonial aesthetics as well as the “political economy of the art system.”9 The strike exposes the ties of donors and board members with extractivist enterprises and the production of weapons of war and mass control, while it also challenges the modern/colonial and liberal approach to art that is reproduced at 586

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MoMA and similar institutions. Different from the approach to art at MoMA, for the Strike MoMA campaign Art is not a luxury, and it is a vital part of our communities and movements. Art is one of the few means of production available to oppressed peoples for the creation and sustaining of worlds in the face of death and destruction.10 Strike MoMA calls for a “collective exit from art’s imbrication in toxic philanthropy and structures of oppression.”11 This collective exit is to be understood as part of an effort to “change the terms of the conversation and point in the direction of something beyond MoMA.” To the question “What about the art?”, Strike MoMA responds “We love art, but we have zero allegiance to the art system of which MoMA is at the epicenter.”12 For Strike MoMA, decolonizing art involves both, extricating it from a system that makes it dependent on the interests of elites, corporations, and states, and reconnecting it with individuals and communities in the process of decolonization. “Strike MoMA” may be read as a manual to engage in a reframing through which art might be interpreted as an effective practice and creation in the exercise of decolonization, understood as the alteration of being. The reframing proposed in the document not only provides the terms to de-exceptionalize the museum but also challenges the strict separation between the aesthetic, the ethical, the political, and the epistemic: “As the walls that artificially separate the museum from the world collapse, we reorient away from the institution and come together to make plans.”13 For individuals and collectives who “were never meant to know each other,” to join in planning requires a decolonial turn by virtue of which the modern/colonial hegemonic institutions become a problem—rather than the racialized and colonized individuals themselves—and the collective process of decolonization becomes a space of possibility for the generation of new views and practices of companionship and togetherness. For Strike MoMA, striking becomes an engine of decolonization where individuals and groups are able to “touch the other, feel the other, discover each other” and reorient freedom in the exercise of what Fanon referred to as “building the world of you.”14 In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon extends a prayer to his body to make him someone who always questions.15 In Strike MoMA and similar decolonial movements, art could be understood as an extension of this prayer, playing a major role in both generating critical questions about modern/colonial institutions, discourses, images, and practices, as well as in reconstituting the bonds of relation among subjects who have been broken and split apart from each other. In the words of Decolonize This Place: “this is decolonial aesthetics, weaving together sensory and spiritual forms from multiple communities and traditions, coming together to say to one another: we see you.”16 DTP’s approach to art and Strike’s MoMA’s search for a post-MoMA future offer a clear example of a combative decolonial aesthetics. I draw from Fanon’s work and from the Frantz Fanon Foundation’s call for combative decoloniality in my approach to combativity here. Fanon urged us to “arm ourselves with firmness and combativeness” and to “constantly combat new forms of colonialism” (Fanon, WE 170).17 The Fanon Foundation warns us not to confuse combativity with critique: Combativity emerges when racialized subjects start to address other racialized subjects in the effort to generate the sense of a collective struggle…. Combativity is about 587

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the path from individual to collective responsibility, and it requires the will and ability to connect with others and to engage in collective movement against coloniality.18 In this process, Fanon reminds us: “There are no clean hands, no innocent bystanders. We are all in the process of dirtying our hands in the quagmire of our soil and the terrifying void of our minds. Any bystander is a coward or a traitor.”19 We are far from a purely academic approach to decolonization here. One is tempted to say that the revolution cannot be curated; it is rather an engine of caring. To care and to curate are etymologically related, but professional curation often reproduces the modern/ colonial desire of “want[ing] the art, not the people.” Decolonize this Place asks: “Why assimilate into a system that perpetuates so much harm. How can institutions become places not of curation but of collective care?”20 Care is also at the center of the Strike MoMA campaign. The section of “Strike MoMA” entitled “Operational Terms for Striking MoMA” starts with references to it: “We proceed on our own terms, not those of the museum. We agree to organize with care, generosity, and patience as we build new relations and deepen existing ones.” The tenth operational term of the strike calls for practicing creativity and care. Combining creativity and care might very well be the central activities in a post-MoMA as well as in a combative decolonial aesthetics. A combative decolonial aesthetics is premised on the fundamental importance of the emergence of people who are not considered people: people killed, erased, obliterated, kidnapped, sold, raped, and tortured. These are people whose lands, knowledges, and creative formations are taken from them and distributed or organized by agents, forces, and institutions of coloniality. Fanon refers to people in this predicament as condemned because there seems to be no exit from their hellish reality. If not killed, their ability to express their humanity by giving and receiving generously is severely jeopardized given what has been and continues to be taken from them—lands, labor, ideas, creations—and the expectation to desire assimilation and inclusion into the very system that legitimizes and tolerates their condition. An-other sense of art, aesthetics, and art history can emerge from the struggles to restore the position of people as free givers and receivers; as people who are coming together to “build the world of you” and in the process obliterate coloniality and end the world as we know it.21 Art itself can be understood in terms of the practice of generous gift giving: art not only as prayer but as ofrenda, as a gift.22 Approaching art as ofrenda runs counters to the monetization and hegemonic curation of art within the modern/colonial capitalist and extractivist art system. In the current art industrial complex, the connection between arts and the gift is severely distorted: it is often multi-millionaire and billionaire donors whose “generosity” makes it possible for hegemonic museums to organize their programs and exhibitions. The system works in function of the imperative: “They want the art, not the people.” In truth, the reality is worse, as the wealth of the donors is often connected to the very practices of exploitation and colonization that create a hellish reality for people. The “gift” of some is often premised on the damnation of others and it further promotes a system that sanitizes and protects colonial and extractivist practices: gift giving turns into art washing.23 Strike MoMA offers a decolonial framework for approaching gift giving, receiving, and fostering the bonds of reciprocity and connection among people—starting with the people who are considered non-people. Being considered non-people means that one cannot even resort to giving oneself to others. It is a world where not even one’s own self has enough 588

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value to be offered to others. The hegemonic art system found a way to perpetuate this state of affairs while benefiting from the extraction and monetization of the artistic works of the condemned. Decoloniality starts when non-people offer their own selves to others, and when they are open to receive the gift of other non-people. These acts of giving and receiving defy the modern/colonial order and directly challenge the expectation of assimilation. DTP mobilizes the concept of “de-assimilation” to point towards an-other aesthetics, ethics, and politics driven by the imperative of decolonization. Strike MoMA calls for the centrality of solidarity, which it understands as “the enactment of the social debts we owe each other.” Its call to operationalize solidarity is worth citing at length: Sharing what you’ve got. Material commitments in light of unevenly shared histories of harm. Commitments to care, to act, to take risks, to speak out, to give as much as one can, and then some. Working on oneself so as not to reproduce systems of harm and oppressive behavior in the process of showing up for each other. Acknowledging debts and acting accordingly forms bonds of reciprocity and healing. Building relations between movements, communities, families, friends. As we weave our struggles together by taking action and holding each other with care, another political imaginary emerges. An intercommunalist, intergenerational imaginary that dis-identifies from the nation-state, from the museum, and its underlying myths of modernity.24 One could or not agree that striking MoMA is a worthy effort, and we did not have to wait for Strike MoMA to have a sense of what a combative decolonial aesthetics is or might be. But Strike MoMA demonstrates that striking institutions that create harm can represent both, ruptures with modern/colonial institutions, aesthetics, and epistemologies, on the one hand, and the creation of decolonial and abolitionist spatio-temporal arrangements where new possibilities for sensing, thinking, and being with others emerge, on the other. In the Strike MoMA campaign the strike becomes a combative terrain where existing bonds of solidarity can be deepened and where new relations of responsibility as well as artistic expressions emerge. If this makes the strike valid and important, the questions that remain are: how to support it and multiply it, as well as how to avoid crossing the picket lines? These considerations are not limited to the Strike MoMA campaign. The question with which this afterword started, “How will the interest of the artworld in decolonization turn this into lasting material commitment?,” cannot be dissociated with this: how to effectively support and join collective decolonial and abolitionist movements that are putting in question the very foundation of the modern/colonial and liberal institutions that we have been taught to love and desire.25

Notes 1 Decolonize This Place, “Decolonial Operations Manual,” 2021, consulted on September 20, 2022, URL: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c5e0c57d86cc9226827c754/t/600b3b61cae c9b2e049d6ca8/1611348841260/DTP_Decolonial+OM_ReaderSpreads_FINAL_lowres.pdf See also related materials at https://decolonizethisplace.org/downloadable-materials 2 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 2. 3 See Alanna Lockward, et al., “Manifesto for a Decolonial Aesthetics,” Transnational Decolonial Institute, 2011, consulted on September 20, 2022. URL: https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/; Walter Mignolo, “Aiesthesis decolonial,” Calle

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Nelson Maldonado-Torres 14: Revista de Investigación en el Campo del Arte 4, no. 4 (2010): 10–25; Nelson MaldonadoTorres, “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality,” Frantz Fanon Foundation, October 2016; consulted on September 20, 2022, URL: http://fondation-frantzfanon.com/ outline-of-ten-theses-on-coloniality-and-decoloniality/ 4 See Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity, trans. M. D. Barber (New York: Continuum, 1995); Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003); Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in V. L. Hyatt & R. Nettleford, eds., Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5–57. 5 See Mignolo, “Aiesthesis decolonial,” 13–14. 6 See, for instance, Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Walter Mignolo, “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: On (De)coloniality, Border Thinking, and Epistemic Disobedience,” Confero, 1, no. 1 (2013): 129–150. 7 MTL+ is a collective created by Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain, both of whom have also played a major role in the formation and various actions of DTP. See Ilana Novick, “Learning from Decolonize This Place,” Hyperallergic January 9, 2017, URL: https://hyperallergic. com/350186/learning-from-decolonize-this-place/ 8 See IIAAF, “Strike MoMA: Framework and Terms for Struggle,” 2021, n.p., consulted on September 20, 2022, URL: https://www.strikemoma.org Other relevant documents and art work produced by the IIAAF and the working groups in support of Strike MoMA can be found on the same website. 9 “Strike MoMA,” n.p. 10 “Strike MoMA,” n.p. 11 “Strike MoMA,” n.p. 12 “Strike MoMA,” n.p. 13 “Strike MoMA,” n.p. 14 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. R. Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 206. 15 The text concludes with the following lines: “My final prayer: O my body, always make me a man who questions!” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 206). 16 DTP, “Decolonial Operations Manual,” n.p. 17 Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 173; Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 170. 18 Mireille Fanon Mendés France and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “For a Combative Decoloniality Sixty Years after Fanon’s Death: An Invitation from the Frantz Fanon Foundation,” Frantz Fanon Foundation, November 30, 2021, consulted on September 20, 2022, URL: http://­ fondationfrantzfanon.com/for-a-combative-decoloniality-sixty-years-after-fanons-death-an-invitation-fromthe-frantz-fanon-foundation/ 19 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 140. 20 DTP, “Decolonial Operations Manual,” n.p. 21 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 206. 22 Particularly relevant here is the work of artists and scholars such as Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Cherríe Moraga, and Laura Pérez. Herrera Rodríguez’s and Moraga’s contributions to the theme are many, some of which can be easily identified in their work at the institution that they cofounded, including the major orientation of this institution: Las Maestras: Center for Xicana[x] Indigenous Thought, Art, and Social Practice at the University of California, Santa Barbara. See also Laura Pérez, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). I am also drawing here from reflections on gift giving and prayer in Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality.” 23 See Maldonado-Torres, Against War, and “Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn,” in Nada Elia, et al., eds. Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 435–462. 24 “Strike MoMA,” n.p. 25 DTP, “Decolonial Operations Manual,” n.p.

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INDEX

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abdullah, Halimah Binti 353–360 Absolon, Kathleen E. 36 abstract art, defined 331 Abu Hamdan, Lawrence 279 Abu’l Fazl 422 Acconci, Vito 94 Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (Bosman) 173 Adams, Ansel 90, 92 Adikah, Elvis Gershon 78 Aéromode [Aéroport Moderne] (Kingelez) 109, 113 African American art 53, 55–56, 60n12, 73 African art 53–54, 56, 60n12, 113, 199 African Diaspora art 53, 56, 59, 60n12 afterlives/futurelives: approximately and contiguously 276–277; contesting perspectives and creating collective approaches 278–279; imagining sustainable future 279–282; visual culture of Dutch Brazil 37; in wake of slow violence and Land Occupation 275–276 Agamben, Giorgio 173, 174, 176 Agassiz, Louis 136 aggressive civilization 4 Ahmed, Sara 16, 130 Akbarnama 422 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) 189 Albán Achinte, Adolfo 505 Alberti, Leon Battista 23, 335, 336

Alexander, M. Jacqui 21 Ali, Salim 425 Allemagne An 2000 (Kingelez) 112 All the Brutes exhibition, Szlaga’s 364–365 al-Muqaffa, ibn 165 Aloi, Giovanni 74; Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader 74 Alonzo, Shannon 275, 276; Subterranean Sentiments of Belonging 275 “alter natives” 279 Alvarado, Leticia 30 America, America (Jaar) 158–161, 159 American Art 55 American Historical Association 9 American Museum of Natural History 583 Amerindian Perspectivism 333 Amigo Warfare 437, 438 Amsterdam Museum 562 Anatsui, El 27 Anderson, Arthur J. O. 255 Anderson, Laurie 315 Anderson, Rhonda 22, 185–194, 255 andeyo 100–101 Andrews, Tarren 488, 489 Angulo Cortés, Liliana 504, 508; Expedición Mutisiana 511–512; Presencia Negra: Portrait of Lucy Rengifo 512–513; Un Caso de Reparación 504, 508–513, 509, 511 Antebi, Susan 75 anthropomorphism 343 anti-racism 25, 55–56, 185, 193, 280

591

Index anti-valeurs (anti-values) 109 Anzaldúa, Gloria E. 5, 15, 16, 119, 317 APA JIKA, The Mis-Placed Comma (Tan) 359–360, 360 Apocalypse Now 435 Aponte, Rafael 210 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 200 Approche de l’Echangeur de Limete (Kingelez) 106, 107, 108 Araeen, Rasheed 301–303 Arbery, Ahmaud 3 Arbus, Diane 569–570 archipelagic thinking 371 Archive Fever (Derrida) 371 Arctic National Wildlife Refuge 189 Arendt, Hannah 119; The Origins of Totalitarianism 119 Armero, José 512 art history: adjunct teaching 228, 230–233, 236; African American and African Diaspora 56, 59, 209, 374; Africanist 22; American 55; in Aotearoa New Zealand 62; Black and brown 57; centrality of vision 29; colonialisms of 169–172; construction of whiteness 23, 26, 363; decolonizing approach 3–12, 18, 23, 31, 36, 73, 167, 169, 172, 175–176, 178, 186, 197, 207, 209, 236, 299–301, 322, 325, 363, 386, 435, 460, 503, 583–584; disciplinary 23, 66, 139, 164, 202, 210, 315, 420, 432, 564; dishumanizing 342–343; Eurocentric view of Renaissance 25; Islamic 176; Japanese 18, 139, 141–147, 148n1, 148n4, 149n6; Māori 61–66, 68, 70; national 143; North American Anglophone 316–317, 319; in pandemic times 3–12; and power 141; prewar 146; queer theory and performance studies 266; re-evaluation of 68; rise of “material turn” 213; structural meta-narrative 196–199, 202; structural problems 197; struggle for more equitable and inclusive 197–198; teaching and writing 51–55, 202–203, 229, 297; textbooks and museum 74, 131, 201, 584; traditional 23; transnational South Asian 363; tribal 64; use of 169; visuality in 22; Western 142, 320–321 Asian art 199, 288, 363 Asif, Manan Ahmed 326 Asphaltum Glance (Awai) 277 Asuka period 144 Atis Rezistans 102–103 Atkinson, Judy 225 Atom Suit persona 307

Attar, Farid al-Din 164, 167, 169–171; The Language of the Birds 164, 167, 170 Aubin, Joseph Marius Alexis 252 Auckland Museum see War Memorial Museum (WMM) Augmented Archive (Warner) 277 Ausangate (sacred mountain) 344 Autorretrato com Anjos/Self-Portrait with Angels (Auxiliadora) 533, 538, 539 Autry, LaTanya S. 7, 59 Auxiliadora da Silva, Maria 37, 531–541; Autorretrato com Anjos/Self-Portrait with Angels 533, 538, 539; The Bride’s Wake/Velório da Noiva 540; Terreiro de Candomblé 533–535, 534, 540; Velório da Noiva/The Bride’s Wake 533, 538 Awai, Nicole 277; Asphaltum Glance 277 Ayón, Belkis 274 Baartman, Sarah 365 Babur, emperor 422, 424, 425 Baburnama 422 Bacon, Francis 337 Báez, Firelei 16; Untitled (Anacaona) 17 Baez, Jennifer 380 Balce, Nerissa 434, 435, 437, 440 Banerjee, Rina 36, 459–467; Infectious Migrations 461; Lure of Places 464–465, 465 Bargellini, Clara 287, 288 Barr, Alfred 85 Barriendos, Joaquín 156 Bartram, Erin 9 The Battle of the Gods and the Giants (Lennon) 336–337 Battuta, Ibn 421 Beane, Kate 506 Bearden, Romare 55 Beattie, Helen Pruitt 299, 300 Becerra, Rodrigo 497, 498 Beckles, Hilary McD. 451 Beer, Stafford 13 Bélain d’Esnambuc, Pierre 279 Belle Hollandaise (Kingelez) 112 Belle, La Vaughn 279; I Am Queen Mary 279 Belmore, Rebecca 231 Belting, Hans 487 Benfield, Dalida María 22 Benin Bronzes 4 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio 275, 522 Benjamin, Walter 117, 118 Benson, LeGrace 17 Bercovitch, Sacvan 156 Berger, Martin A. 363; Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture 363 Bermingham, Ann 390

592

Index Bernier, François 337 Best, Stephen 27 Betancourt, Roland 36 Beuys, Joseph 302, 303 Beyer, Georgina 264 Bhabha, Homi K. 242, 243, 523 Bhalla, Atul 427, 428 Biaya, T. K. 110 Biden, Joe 153 Bigaud, Wilson 101, 102 Biko, Steve: I Write What I Like 571 Bilqis 167 binary gender 499 BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) 22, 131, 185–187, 189, 190, 192–193, 207, 209–210, 214, 267, 482 Birth of a Nation (Lin) 410, 410–413 Bisquet, Katherine 125 Black Arts Movement 317 Blackbird in Mississippi (Corbett) 79–80 Black conquistadors 376–377 Black feminism 209 The Black Girl in Search of God (Shaw) 537 Black-Indian union 379 Black, Leon 586 Black Lives Matter movement 4, 49–59, 50, 317, 380, 516n26, 586 Black Looks (hooks) 31–32 Black Madonnas 367, 368, 369–370 Blackness: in Boston 136; and brown people 186, 190, 194; dehumanization of 23; and disability 73–74, 76; divine power of 377; and Indigeneity 13, 37, 84, 207, 325, 374–381; modern constructions of 374; queer 13, 27, 506; speculative fiction 76, 80–81; in United States 78, 267; visibility and invisibility of 17, 37, 546–547; visual cultural studies 435 “Blackout Tuesday” 51 Black Power Movement 220 Black Skin, White Masks to Black Skin, Black Masks (Fanon) 550, 551 Blaut, J.M. 199 Blier, Suzanne Preston 371 Bloom, Jonathan M. 200 Body Double (Syjuco) 435–436, 436 Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Schalk) 76 Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams (Kingelez) 105 Bologna, Giovanni. da 503 Bolton, John 160 Book of Kings (Shahnama) (Firdawsi) 165, 168 Boone, Elizabeth Hill 251–254 Borgia Group codices 257–259

Bosman, Willem 173; Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea 173 Botánica Cimarrón (Feliz) 536 Bourdieu, Pierre 228, 230, 270 Boyce, Sonia 274, 280 Boyer, Jean-Pierre 100 Bradford, Mark 27 Braidotti, Rosi 343 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 277, 522, 525, 546, 547 Braudel, Fernand 275 Brayboy, Bryan McKinley Jones 26 Brethren of Purity 165 Breton, André 101, 102 British colonialism 305, 419, 466 British Empire exhibition, London 353 British Museum 128, 132, 172, 353 Brittenham, Claudia 347 Brooklyn Museum 583 Brosses, Charles. de 173 Brown, Rebecca M. 36 Bruguera, Tania 220 Brunelleschi, Filippo 335, 336 Buckridge, Steeve O. 452, 453 Buhe, Elizabeth 77, 78 Buissert, David 375 Burkhart, Brian 348 Butler, Judith 122, 156, 267 Butler, Octavia E. 73, 76 Byrd, Jodi A. 319 Caballero, Luciano 514 Caballero, Pablo 511, 513, 514 Cabañas, Kaira M. 57 Cabrera, Miguel 379, 380; De Negro y d’India, China cambuja 379–380 Cachia, Amanda 17 Cagoub, Olivier-Clément 106 Caldas, Francisco José de 511 Calfuqueo, Seba 36 California landscape 92 California mission art and architecture studies: Acjachemen victims 290–291; art historical myopia 287; colonial hegemony 288–289; colonial matrix of power (CMP) 287; ecological stewardship 289–290; first peoples of land 289; Indigenous art 286; Indigenous builders 291; Indigenous land and life 286–287; mission art or Spanish Colonial 287–288; settler colonial violence 289; Stone Church 290–293, 291, 292; Western superiority 290 Calvin, John 557 camay, Inka concept of 401, 407 Cammock, Helen 279

593

Index Camping and Tramping through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya exhibition 353, 356 Campos-Pons, María Magdalena 277, 519, 520; Constellation 522; Elevata 277, 522; Nesting IV 522, 522; She Always Knew of the Space In-Between 522, 524 Campt, Tina M. 229, 231, 232 capitalism 18, 29, 173–175, 178, 233, 248, 278, 318; colonialist 298, 299–301; gore capitalism 30; identity in 234; industrial 233, 235, 309; legacies of 80; patriarchal structure of 230; racial 219, 278; settler 235, 236 Capote, Yoan 520 Caragol, Taína 87 care 5, 32, 35, 62–64, 588; and attention 114, 467; communal 36; community of 224; and compassion 110; and creativity 588; and custody 575; and emotions 333; environmental 275; health 191, 221; of HIV patients 110; and love 467, 541; mutual and ethical 36 Carrasco, Hugo 499 Carrington, Leonora 280 casta painting 483–485 Castro, Fidel 117, 118, 121; Palabras a los Intelectuales (“Words to the Intellectuals”) 118 Catholic encoding 533–536 center and periphery, notion of 57 Centrale Palestinienne (Kingelez) 109 Césaire, Aimé 5, 14 Chacón Bernal, Carolina 510 Chaganti, Seeta 488 Chamberlain, Colin 338 Chambers, Eddie 9–10, 17 Chambers, Robert 386, 388–390, 394 Chancy, Myriam J. A. 522 Chatterjee, Indrani 392 Chatterjee, Sria 213 Chavez, Yve 10, 22 Cherry River: Where the Rivers Mix 304–305 Chiang, Olivia 209, 215 Chihuailaf, Elicura 497 Chikaba, Teresa: Compendio de la Vida ejemplar de la venerable Madre 537 Chiribiquete, Colombia 332, 332 Chowdhury, Zirwat 31 Cipriani, Lido 576 cisgender 231, 488 class 16, 32, 110, 121–122, 154, 279, 453; see also race Cleaves, Wallace 488 Cleveland Museum of Art 140 Clunas, Craig 197

Codex Borgia 251–253, 258, 260, 260 Codex de la Cruz Badiano 210 Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón (Rodriguez) 210 Cohen-Aponte, Ananda 22 Colard, Sandrine 17 Colbert, Stephen 342 collaboration: between an artist and farmer 212; artistic 123; and curation 355; with Ethnic Studies at university level 210; and exchange 326; between humans 246; Indigenous communities 36; loving 536–540; and reciprocity 18, 185, 297; research-action-creation in 510, 517n37; and visibility 122 The Collapse of the Conquistador Don Diego de Mazariegos (Turok) 6 College Art Association (CAA) 9 Collins, Patricia Hill 131 colonial agnosia 565n7 colonialism 367, 412, 414; aftermath of 275; of art history 169–172; British 305, 419, 466; capitalist world system 74, 81; consequences as “metaphysical catastrophe” 23; COVID 279; education of 193; European 3, 18, 198; fallout of 325; internal 108, 158–159; legacies of 80, 316, 319, 428; and modernity 130; “(neo) colonialism” of seeing 28; and racism 74, 80, 86, 134; settler 5, 7, 25, 75–76, 153, 160, 185–187, 198, 200, 232–233, 235, 289, 316–317, 319, 321, 324, 419, 471, 488–489, 585; slow violence and territorial occupation of 22, 275; spatial abstraction 334; struggle against 18, 154; transatlantic 528; violence of 414 coloniality 16, 31, 134, 412; in Aotearoa 62; of being 14–16, 124; capitalist exchange system 233; complexities of 161; decolonization and ‘des-gener-acción’ 15; and disability 29; fortress 108; of language 157; linguistic 160; and modernity 241–245, 248, 337, 338, 487, 584; “Other” 176; of power 5, 154; and settler colonialism 583, 585; unveiling of 108–109 colonial power matrix 3 color vision 520 Colston, Edward 50 Colthurst, John 447–449 Coltrane, Alice 77–78 Coltrane, John 77 The Columbus Assembly (Motta) 504, 508 Columbus, Christopher 5, 97, 98, 102, 193, 279, 331, 380, 381, 504–507, 514 Col. William Monson, his wife Anne Monson, and an Indian Attendant (Devis) 391

594

Index Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You (Tan) 353, 356–357 The Communist Manifesto 242 Community of Parting (Kaisen) 240–241, 241, 244 Compendio de la Vida ejemplar de la venerable Madre (Chikaba) 537 “The Concourse of the Birds” (Habiballah) 177 Concrete Creek (Zakai) 305 Conde, Meryse 277 conopas 401 Conrad, Derek 551 Conrad, Geoffrey W. 400 Corradi Fiumara, Gemma 507 Conrad, Joseph 364, 365; Demi-God Surrounded by the Elegant Brutality of His Own Choosing 364; The Heart of Darkness 364 Constellation (Campos-Pons) 522 Consumption as Assimilation (Humalajoki ) 233 Copley, John Singleton 55 Coppola, Francis Ford 364 Corbett, Shawanda 17, 73–81; Blackbird in Mississippi 79–80; To the Fields of Lilac 78, 79; Neighbourhood Garden 77 Cordero, Jonathan 286 Corey, Pamela N. 31 Corvi-Mora gallery, London 77 country marks 454 COVID-19 37n5, 62, 93, 586; BIPOC students 209; creative online space 280; decolonizing art history 3–12; disability 30; impact and legacy of colonialism 279; lockdowns 4; vaccines 191 Cox, Renee 549; The Last Supper 549; Yo Mama and the Statue 549 Cozier, Christopher 276 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 270 Creole Andrew 454 The Creole Archive (Kolasiński) 366–367, 369, 370 Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence and Location of the Caribbean Figure (Kempadoo) 276–277 Critical Mission Studies approach 286 critical race theory 8, 19, 22, 209, 434, 483 Critique of Judgment (Kant) 27 ‘Crocodile (gavialus gangeticus)’ 424, 424 Crofton, James 449 Crutzen, Paul J. 297, 301, 309 Cuban Museum of Dissent 121–122 Cuban Revolution or La Revolución 118; decolonizing 117; legal violence 118; Padilla’s Shadow 118; revolutionary power 118 cultural studies 317–319, 435, 551

culture, concept of 317 Cureau, Marin 337 cyborg 73–77, 79, 80 Dabrowska, Katarzyna Mikulska 252, 258 Dada’s Funeral (Tyrell) 277 Dalit-Bahujan activism 323 Dalit Studies scholarship 323 Darder, Antonia 33, 36 Das, S. 135 Davidson, Jane Chin 22 Davis, Angela 570 Davis, Carol Boyce 522 Davison, Bruce 570, 574, 575; Lobedu Material Culture 574 Davison, P. J. 575 The Dawn of Everything (Graeber and Wengrow) 332 Deafey, Ellen 477 Dean, Carolyn 11, 31, 400, 401, 404, 405 de-assimilation, concept of 589 debility, notion of 412 debility, space of 412–414 “Declaration of Humanity” 145 decolonial: activism 15; aesthetics 11, 586–589; art history 167, 172, 175–176, 178; of being and doing 15, 33; Caribbean artmaking and visuality 277; cinemas 242–246, 248; collaborative co-creations 504; decolonial turn 5;feminism 278; futures 9, 409–410; imaginary 11; interrogations of authoritative narratives 504; liberation 17–18, 32; living 36, 119; love 32–34, 36; modern nationstate as site of coloniality 154; notion of failure 154; pedagogy 22, 225; performative 133; possibility 409, 412, 415–416; praxis 31, 161, 288, 411, 470, 486–489; project 22, 156, 160, 410–412, 416, 487; scholarship 331; semiotic practices 243; struggles 155–156, 161; theory 23, 27, 265, 336; thinking 119, 157, 220 decolonial ecologies: barbarian (charging) 466–467; colonial legacy 459–460; contagion (diagnosis) 460–461, 462, 463–464; electricity (resistance) 464–466 decolonial failure 154, 160 A Decolonial Feminism (Vergès) 278 decolonial turn 5 decolonization 7, 15, 96–97, 111, 266, 355, 409–411, 417, 507; of art history 3–12, 17, 18, 23, 31, 36, 73, 167, 169, 172, 175–176, 178, 185, 197, 207, 209, 236, 299–301, 322, 325, 363, 386, 435, 460, 503, 583–587;

595

Index BIPOC institutions 187; collaborative institutional 185; concept of nature 500; cultural and methodological 504; disability studies 73–75, 81; on economic and administrative level 187; epistemic ignorance 336, 349; failure 108; institutional and public uptake 316; is not a metaphor 5, 185, 264, 271, 318, 485; political 171, 485; praxis of restitution and futurity 486; social inequality 505; strategic essentialism 325; struggle towards 478; visceral logics of 415 Decolonization 2.0 316, 318, 322 Decolonize This Place (DTP) movement 135, 583 Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People (Smith) 251, 265 Deep Listening (dadirri) 224, 225 Degnen, Cathrine 348 De Indio y Negra, nace Lobo (Islas) 380 Delany, Samuel R. 154, 155; Times Square Red, Times Square Blue 154 Deloria Jr., Vine 473 Deloria, Philip J. 230 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth 37 Demi-God Surrounded by the Elegant Brutality of His Own Choosing (Conrad) 364 De Negro y d’India, China cambuja (Cabrera) 379–380 denial of coevalness 486 Denzin, Norman K. 10, 32, 219, 298 Deren, Maya 370; Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti 370 Derrida, Jacques 371; Archive Fever 371 Descartes, René 332, 333, 335–338 Desmoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso) 85 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques 367, 370 de-suture 248–249 developing countries 301 Devis, Arthur W. 388, 390–393; Col. William Monson, his wife Anne Monson, and an Indian Attendant 391; Lady Frances Chambers 387, 392–394 dialogue 12, 36, 186, 222; active 224; built environment 10; decolonial 222, 225; listening and recognizing 507; with ngen 499–500; opacity 21; Phaedrus 176; sculptures in 86; and solidarity 33 Dialogue de Paix (Kingelez) 109 Diaz, Ella Maria 210, 215 Dibble, Charles E. 255 disability 73; aesthetics 30–31, 411–414; and colonialism 80; and coloniality 29; COVID-19 pandemic 30; identitybased notion 411; medical model of 75;

narrative 76; physical rehabilitation 80; social model of 75; studies 22, 29, 73, 75, 411–412 disability, notion of 411 dishumanizing art history 342; beyond Inka 346–347; humans as species and human condition 348; Inka Worlds 343–346, 345 Distancia (Marambio) 246–247, 247 Dithugula tša Malefokana (Mahashe) 577–578, 579 Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (Deren) 370 Doctrine of Discovery 193 Doha Museums 172 double consciousness 20 Double Edge Theatre 185–187 Dowell, Kristin L. 479 Doxtater, June Chiquita 233–235 Doyle, Shane 304 3D-printed sculptures 367–369 Drewal, Henry John 22 Du Bois, W. E. B. 5, 20, 129–130 Duffaut, Préfèt 102 Duggan-Cronin, Alfred Martin 570, 572, 574, 580n5 Duncan, C. 128, 129, 131 Duncanson, Robert 55 Dupree, Ambrose 506 Durand, Asher Brown 55 Dürer, Albrecht 336 Dussel, Enrique 5, 20, 117, 241 Dutch West India Company (WIC) 555–556 Dyer, Richard 363, 365 Earle, Rebecca 448 Earth Time 1.78, Madrid (Echelman) 503–504, 505 East India Company 385 Eburne, Jonathan P. 22, 192 Echangeur of Limete 106–108 Echelman, Janet 503, 504; Earth Time 1.78, Madrid 503–504, 505 Eckhout, Albert 557, 558, 560–561 ecocide 18 ecocriticism 37, 427 Eden 101–102, 103 educational turn 220 Edwards, Elizabeth 78, 476; Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture 78 Eguiluz, Paula. de 512 Ehlers, Jeannette 279; I Am Queen Mary 279 El Anatsui: Versatility 27 Electric Dress 464 Elevata (Campos-Pons) 277, 522 Elleray, Michelle 268

596

Index Ellis, Ngarino 17 Ellison, Ralph 26 Emperor Akbar 422 Emperor Hirohito 145 Empire exhibition, Wembley 356, 357, 359 Empress Josephine 279 Encuentro Internacional de Arte de Medellín exhibition 510 Encumbrimento/The Cloaking (Minaya) 381, 382 Engblom, Peter 570, 571 Enríquez de Almanza, Viceroy Martín 379 enslavement 23, 74, 231, 380, 449, 452, 513; African 134, 381, 532; human 509, 560; legal 100 Enwezor, Okwui 266, 570, 571 epistemic extractivism 20 epistemicide 18, 19, 344 epistemic ignorance 336, 349 Erased Lynching series (Gonzales-Day) 84, 86, 91, 93, 93 Erdrich, Louise 471 Esbell, Jaider 274 Escobar, Arturo 5, 337 ethnic studies 7, 210, 434 ethnocide 18 ethnographic photography 576–578 ethno-nationhood 147 eurocentrism 22, 23; abandonment of 14; in Anglophone academies 318; and asymmetrical power relations 460; conceptions of being 16; conceptions of civilization and modernity 510; history and subjecthood 5; justice and restitution 478; master narratives 8; modernity 248; naturalization of 8; nature and culture 493; or white supremacy 52; primacy of visual and of seeing 30; of Renaissance 25 European colonialism 3, 18, 198 Evans, Lara M. 9 exhibition 10; art 122, 305, 321, 322; contemporary art 304; Euro-Western 343; gallery 87; Ghetto Biennale 103; making 23; multi-venue 221; in Port-auPrince 103; racist 135; of Rinpa-style Japanese art 196; transnational 356; in United States 93 Expedición Mutisiana (Angulo) 511–512 “Explicit Inclusion Identity” 264 extractivism 20, 84, 485, 495, 512 Fabian, Johannes 486 Fabulous (moore) 267 FAFSWAG performance 263–264, 265, 266–269, 271

Fanon, Frantz 5, 15, 32, 365, 415, 550, 551, 571, 583, 584, 587, 588; Black Skin, White Masks to Black Skin, Black Masks 550, 551; The Wretched of the Earth 571 Faundez, Antonio 219 Fay, Eliza 385, 393, 394 Feagin, Joe R. 25 Feliz, Star Catherine 531–532, 536–537; Botánica Cimarrón 536 feminism 15, 27, 32, 73, 75–76, 228, 232, 235, 324–325, 367; Black 519, 528, 531–532, 537; in Caribbean land and seascapes 278; cultural geography 319; decolonizing contingencies 236; ecological violence 305; initiations 230–232; knowledge-making approaches 278; notion of “connected knowing” 507; outsider art 232–233; The Rebel 233–235; trans-exclusionary 270; transnational 409; unfinished work 229–230 Ferdinand, Malcom 276 Fernández Retamar, Roberto 160 fetish 173–174 Fialho, Alex 548 Fighting the Currents (Huggins) 280 Finley, Cheryl 209 Firdausi of Tus 165, 167, 171; Book of Kings (Shahnama) 165, 168 “First World” nations 102 Fisi’inaua, Akashi 263, 269 Fleetwood, Nicole R. 26, 547 Florentine Codex 210, 251, 254–256, 258 Flores, Patrick 459, 467 Flores, Tatiana 17, 55, 84–89, 92, 94, 215, 276, 485 Floyd, George 3, 49, 50, 61, 192, 207, 380, 506 Foley, Gary 220 For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts (Rodríguez) 482 Forge Project 233 Fotomuseum Winterthur 572 Foucault, Michel 134, 268 found imagery 85 Frame, Mary 399 Francia, Luis 433 François Ghebaly Gallery 410 Freedom Dreaming 208 Freiman, Lisa D. 523 Freire, Paulo 5, 32, 33, 213, 219, 223, 224, 333, 504; Pedagogy of the Oppressed 33, 333, 504 From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (Weems) 135 Full Circle performance (Sanford) 460 Fusco, Coco 118, 355; Padilla’s Shadow 118

597

Index Gae Lebowa exhibition 571, 573–574, 575 Gago, Tanu 268, 269 Gago, Verónica 157 Gaines, André Strongbearheart 191 Galanin, Nicholas 130; White Noise, American Prayer Rug 130, 130 Galeano, Eduardo 157 gallery 96–97, 245, 322, 467, 583, 584; art 51, 56, 64; commercial 87; European portrait 467; exhibitions 87; Haitian 103; official 123; university 87 Gamalinda, Eric 438, 439 García Canclini, Néstor 7 García-Jacquier, Priscila 485 Garvey, Marcus 5 Gassendi, Pierre 338 Gaudio, Michael 557 gender 7, 10, 16–17, 22, 32, 73, 76, 80, 229–232, 279, 413–415, 447; academy traditional strictures 230; binary 499; chrono- and geo-politics 249; identity 86, 483; inequality 110; issues 472; language 260; non-normative 268; performativity of 267; as principle of partition 228; queer 263; rankings 68; securing 267; and sexuality 268, 369, 416, 460, 483, 487; stereotypes 77; trans 267 genocide 18, 128; cultural 194; histories of 381; Indigenous 134; intentional 194; race war 433–434; settler colonialism 187, 289; and slavery 546 The Gentlemen of Esmeraldas (Sánchez Galque) 377, 378 Getino, Octavio 241–243, 245, 247; La Hora de los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) 247–248 Getty, J. Paul 86, 87, 136 Ghachem, Malick W. 451 ghariyal (gavialis gangeticus) 422–423, 425 Ghetto Biennale 102–103 Ghosh, Amitav 420; The Great Derangement 420 Ghost Dancing 281 Ghosts, Girls, Grandmas (Niro) 233–234, 234, 236 Gibbon, Edward 488 Giroux, Henri 223 Glissant, Édouard 21, 57, 112–114, 275, 276, 277, 348, 367, 368, 371, 375; Poetics of Relation 375 Global South 172, 210, 244, 274–275, 318–321, 325, 328n23, 409, 412, 414, 417, 535 Gobin, Anuradha 37 Gogh, Vincent. van 196, 199, 207; Irises 196, 199

Gold Coast 561 Golden Age 562, 564 Gómara, Francisco López. de 376 Gómez-Barris, Macarena 8 Gonzales-Day, Ken: Erased Lynching series 84, 86, 91, 93, 93; Lynching in the West 89; Nightfall 90; Profiled series 86, 87; Searching for California Hang Trees 88, 89; Unseen 87; Untitled 87, 91 Gonzales-Day, Ken. 12, 17, 84–85, 87–89, 92–94 Gordon, Leah 103 Gordon, Lewis R. 26, 27; kinds of invisibility 26 Gosden, Chris 78; Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture 78 Gosine, Andil 281 Grady, Jo 52 Graeber, David 332, 333; The Dawn of Everything 332 Graham, Mary 220 Grandin, Greg 158 The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande (Mazeaud) 305 The Great Derangement (Ghosh) 420 great watchers 344 Grech, Shaun 74 Green Belt Movement 301–302, 305 Griffith, D. W. 413 Groninger Museum 111 “grotesque” and “untidy” celebrations 563 Guaidó, Juan 160 Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe 378 Guerts, Kathryn Linn 78 güiro, or bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria) 210, 212, 212–214, 214 Gutai Group exhibition 464 Guthrie, Woody 153 Guzmán, Lynette 208 Haberman, David 428 Habiballah 176; “The Concourse of the Birds” 177 Habtom, Sefanit 208 The Hague 560 Haiti: andeyo 100–101; Eden 101–102, 103; Hyppolite’s paintings 101; Kreyòl 101–102, 103; Marriage 101–102; telejol 101 Hall, Stuart 317, 367 Hamilton, Andrew James 10, 31 haptic images 547 Haraway, Donna 73, 76, 278, 301 Harris, Cheryl I. 25 Harris, Leslie M. 439 Hartman, Saidiya 12, 279, 485, 507, 513, 514

598

Index headwrapping 449 The Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 364 Hegel, G. W. F. 174 Helguera, Pablo 220 Heng, Geraldine 488 Herramientas Colectivas (Collective Tools) 244–248 Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear bombing of 306–307 Hitler, Adolf 14 Hockney, David 58 Hodges, William 98 Hogarth, William 387 Höller, Carston 105 homosexuality, European concept of 268 Hood Museum of Art 521 hooks, bell 5, 12, 21, 31, 32, 219, 223, 225; Black Looks 31–32 Hoopoe 164–165, 167, 176 Huggins, Nadia 280 human, concept of 342, 348 humanistic values 14 Humboldt, Alexander. von 136 Hunt, Sarah 344, 348 Hutton, Deborah 10, 11, 22 Hyacinthe, Genevieve 10, 37 Hyde, John 388, 393 Hylton, Richard 52, 56–58 Hyppolite, Hector 100, 101

subversion of visuality 400–401; keros 398; metalwork 402; tocapus 402–404; urpu 398–399, 402 Inka Throne 344 International exhibition, Washington, DC 101 International Imagination of Anti-National Anti-Imperalist Feelings (IIAAF) 584–586 International Institute of Artivism Hannah Arendt (INSTAR) 119–120, 122–125 intersectionality 86, 88, 94, 482 Intimate Terrains: Representations of a Disappearing Landscape exhibition 35 invisibility: of Blackness 17, 37, 546–547; kinds of 26; politics of 432–435 Invisible Man (Ellison) 26 Irises (Gogh) 196, 199 Irises at Yatsuhashi (Korin) 196 Islands of Decolonial Love (Simpson) 32 itrofil mongen, concept of 497 Iziko Museums 574

I Am Queen Mary (Belle and Ehlers) 279 Ibargüen, Pedro Antonio 512 identity, notion of 200 Ikeda, Ichi 298, 299, 305–309; Wheel of Hope 299 illuminationism 176 imperial monument 389–393 Imperial Museum 143, 172 imperial spacing 386–389 Impey, Elijah 386–389, 393 Impey, Lady Mary 386–389 inakale motif 110 ‘Indian bustard’ (Mansur) 425–426, 426 Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act 421 Indigeneity: African enslavement 134; of Americas 14; and Blackness 13, 37, 84, 207, 325; children in Western Canada 4; Mexican 13; sign and event 319; in visual-cultural record 17 Indigenous Land 318–320 Industria de Pharmacia (Kingelez) 109, 113 Infectious Migrations (Banerjee) 461 Inka art: All-Toqapu Tunic 403; Calle Inca Roca 404–405, 405; camay 401–402; conopas 401; geometric and abstract 400; historical discussions 398; inversion or

Jaar, Alfredo 18, 151, 153–158, 160, 161; America, America 158–161, 159; A Logo for America 151–158, 152, 153, 160 Jack, Deborah 519, 524–528 Jackson, Moana 62, 70 Jahangir emperor 426 Jahangirnama 426 Jain, Kajri 31, 460 Japanese art history 18, 139, 141–147, 148n1, 148n4, 149n6; archaeology and art history 141; defined 142; gunboat diplomacy 143; invention of 142–144; Meiji Imperial Cultural Policies 142–144; Nihon bijutsushi 145; place-centric 147–148; postwar era 145–147; Time in the History of Art 147; White Path Between Two Rivers 139, 140, 141, 141 Jarzombek, Mark 336 Jean-Louis, Fabiola 27; Madame Beauvoir’s Painting 27, 28 Jiro, Yoshihara 306 Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) 571 Johnson, Leasho 277; Sweet Sugarcane 277 Johnson, Samuel 390 Jones, Amelia 22, 27 Jones, Keisha 34 Jones, Saeed 506 journey 569–571 J. Paul Getty Museum collection 86, 87, 136 Judovitz, Dalia 335 justice: divine call 118; economic 36, 209; environmental 209, 213; and equity 10; Eurocentric concepts of 478; Freire’s pedagogy of 33; racial 3, 59, 121, 192,

599

Index 374; service of 7; social 3, 59, 121, 133, 192, 193, 222, 280, 505, 532; spatial 222; struggles for 514; water 305 Kahukiwa, Robyn 66 Kaisen, Jane Jin 240, 244, 245 Kant, Immanuel 27; Critique of Judgment 27 Kaphar, Titus 87 Kaplan, Amy 433 Karlholm, Dan 147 Karmali, Tahir Carl 76 Karttunen, Frances 256, 258 Kassim, Sumaya 7, 18 Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani 409, 416 Kawharu, Merata 303–305 K–12 curricula 209 Kelley, Robin D.G. 208 Kempadoo, Roshini 22; Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence and Location of the Caribbean Figure 276–277; Like Gold Dust 280, 281 keros 398 Kester, Grant H. 503, 504, 507 Khanna, Neetu 415, 416 kiichas 287 Kim, Dorothy 488 Kim, Eunsong 128, 135, 136 Kim, Jodi 434 Kimün or knowledge in Mapudungun 497 King Charles V 376 Kingelez, Bodys Isek 17, 105–114; Aéromode [Aéroport Moderne] 109, 113; Allemagne An 2000 112; anti-valeurs 109; Approche de l’Echangeur de Limete 106, 107, 108; Belle Hollandaise 112; Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams 105; Centrale Palestinienne 109; Dialogue de Paix 109; Industria de Pharmacia 109, 113; La Cité du 24 Novembre de l’Authenticité pour les Musées Zairois 109, 113; Magiciens de la Terre 112; “Maquettes Modeles” or “Extreme Maquettes” 108–110, 114; Maryland University 109, 112; Mongolique Soviétique 112; New Manhattan 109, 111–112; Nippon Tower 112; oeuvre 105–106; Palais d’Hiroshima 109, 111; Paris Nouvel 112; Réveillon fédéral 109; The Scientific Center of Hospitalisation the SIDA 109, 110–111, 111; U.N. 109; Ville de Sete 112; Ville Fantôme 105, 109; VR tour 105 King Ferdinand 98 King Leopold II 106 King, Martin Luther 9, 101 King Philip III 377, 378

King Solomon 167 King, Tiffany Lethabo 546 Kistler, Logan 212 Kitaj, R. B. 58 Kleege, Georgina 29 Klein, Stacy 22, 189–194 Kīngitanga pan-tribal movement 63 Kolasiński, Jacek J. 31, 363–371 Ko ni weychan (The Struggles of Water) 495 Korin, Ogata 196; Irises at Yatsuhashi 196, 199 Korzeniowski, Józef Teodor Konrad 364 Kowkülen (liquid being) 495, 496 Kreyòl 101–102, 103 Krige, E. J. and Krige, J. D. 574–577; The Realm of a Rain-Queen 574–577 Kristeva, Julia 547 Kubler, George 398, 399; father of preColumbian art history 398 Kuokkanen, Rauna 348, 349 Lacadena, Alfonso 253, 254, 258, 259 La Cité du 24 Novembre de l’Authenticité pour les Musées Zairois (Kingelez) 109, 113 Lady Frances Chambers (Devis) 387, 392–394 La Hora de los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) (Getino and Solanas) 247–248 Lamar, Alba Isabel 208 Lam, Wifredo 101 Land Back movement 189, 193 Lander, Edgardo 11 Lander, Maureen 61 Landry, Olivia 20 The Language of the Birds (Attar) 164, 167, 170 La Pologne 367 Lara, Fernando Luiz 10, 31, 33 Lasuén, Fermín Francisco de 290 Laszlo, Pierre 525 Latifah, Queen 270 Latin American 55, 59; art 25, 54, 147, 288; cartography 156; concept of latinidad 159; Francophile 159; immigration 151; Monroe doctrine 158; struggle against Western colonization 118–119 latinidad, concept of 159–160 Latinx decolonial praxis: decoloniality 487–489; grief and re-existence 484–486 LaTorre, Guisela 5 Latour, Bruno 19, 348, 477, 484 Laudanum (Moffatt) 231–232 Lawrence, Jacob 55 Lear, Jonathan 309; Radical Hope 309 Le Bouclier de la Révolution (The Shield of the Revolution) 106 Lechtman, Heather 402 Lee, Damien 34, 473 Lefebvre, Henri 333

600

Index Leibhammer, Nessa 571–572 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 337 Leigh, Simone 280, 381 Leocaria, Junadry 556–557, 561–564; Keti Koti 555; Sugar Coated 555–556, 556, 562, 564 León de la Barra, Pablo 151 Let Me Entertain You (Richards) 550, 550–551 Levinas, Emmanuel 507 Levin, Melissa 548 Lewis, Edmonia 55 Lewis, Martin W. 198, 199; Myth of the Continents: A Critique of Metageography 198 Lewis, Norman 55 Lewis, Talila L. 29 Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s – Now exhibition 274 Like Gold Dust (Kempadoo) 280, 281 Lin, Candice 31, 410, 412; Birth of a Nation 410, 410–413 Lincoln, Yvonna S. 10, 32, 219, 298 Lionnet, Françoise 278, 374; Minor Transnationalism 374 Littlecrow-Russell, Sara 281; The Secret Powers of Naming 281 Livesay, Daniel 390 Lives of the Artists (Vasari) 23 “The Living Presence of Our History” 185, 186 Livingston, Jennie 266 Livingston, Julie 414 Liyolo, Alfred 106 Llanquinao, Gabriel 497, 498 Lloyd, David 434, 436 Lobedu Material Culture (Davison) 574, 575 lobo (literally wolf) 380 Lochner, Stefan: Madonna of the Rose Bower 538 Locke, Hew 279; The Procession 279 A Logo for America (Jaar) 151–158, 152, 153, 160 Lomax, Alan 564 Lomuto, Sierra 488 Lonetree, Amy 7, 289 longue durée, notion of 275 Lopez, Felicia Rhapsody 22 Lopez, Jennifer 153 Lorde, Audre 31, 70, 131, 270 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) 169, 391 A Loss of Faith Brings Vertigo (Richards) 548 L’Ouverture, Toussaint 366, 370 Love, Bettina 208 loving ethnography 37 Lowe, Lisa 319 Lowe, Miranda 135

Lubbock, John 173; The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man 173 Lugones, María C. 5, 119, 122, 124 Lumumba, Patrice 108, 110 Lure of Places (Banerjee) 464, 465 Lynching in the West (Gonzales-Day) 89 Maathai, Wangarĩ 275, 281, 298, 301–303, 305 Mabo, Eddie Koiki 220 Mackey, Frank 451 Madame Beauvoir’s Painting (Jean-Louis) 27, 28 Mãe Maria 540–541; Colheita de Flores/Flower Harvest 536; A Colheita do Cactus/The Harvest of Cactus 535; Colheita/Harvest 536; Flores no campo/Flowers in the field 536, 538; Refeiçao/Meal 536 Magiciens de la Terre (Kingelez) 112 Mahashe, George 12, 37; Dithugula tša Malefokana 577–578, 579; K519 578; Molobedu 572, 573 Mair, Lucille Mathurin 449 Major-Frégeau, Madeleine 453 “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) campaign, Trump’s 153, 156 Makwala, Jeremane 572 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson 5, 10, 14, 15, 23, 37, 155, 156 Mallard, Trevor 69 Mambety, Djibril Diop 243 Mamdani, Mahmood 335 Mami Wata 535 Mann, Larry Spotted Crow 22, 185–188, 190–195 Mansour, Sliman: Yaffa painting 34, 35 Māori, Kaupapa 11, 17, 18, 22, 61–70, 263–270, 298, 303–306, 486 Mapuche 36, 494–500, 500n2, 501n3, 501n5 Marambio, Camila 246; Distancia 246–247, 247 Mariño Fernández, María de Lourdes 18 Marks, Laura 547 Marne, Wes 223 Marriage 101–102 Marsden, Dawn 475 Martí, José 121, 158, 159 Martiel, Carlos 23; Punto di Fuga 24 Martineau, Jarrett 286, 289 Martin, Kathleen J. 473 Marxian movement 242 Maryland University (Kingelez) 109, 112 Massey, Doreen 331 Mathur, Saloni 57 Matom, Victor 574 Matu Ram Varma 323 Maturana, Humberto 34 Maurits, Johan 555–558, 560–562, 564 Mauss, Marcel 264

601

Index Mbembe, Achille 279 McCoy, Alfred 434 McHugh, Susan 74; Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader 74 McKenzie, Marcia 224 McKittrick, Katherine 19 Mead, Hirini Moko 65 Mendoza, Viceroy Antonio de 376, 377 Mercer, Kobena 317 Mestre, Marta 534, 535 metaphysical catastrophe 23 Metropolitan Museum 170, 177, 212 Michael Richards: Winged exhibition 548 Michelangelo 207 Mignolo, Walter D. 5, 11, 19, 20, 36, 108, 134, 159, 241, 242, 287, 337, 482, 486, 584 The Milk of Dreams exhibition 280 Miller, Indigo Gonzales 507 Miller, Kei 274, 280; ‘concern for mermaids’ 274 Miller, Theresa L. 537 Minaya, Joiri 381; Encumbrimento/The Cloaking 381, 382 Minh-ha, Trinh T. 244, 278 Minimalist movement in Land Art 304 minor transnationalism 381 Minor Transnationalism (Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih) 374 Mirón, Luis F. 36 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 135 Mississippi State Penitentiary see Parchman Farm Mitchell, David T. 75 Mitchell, W. J. T. 28 mixed race 376–379, 449, 451, 454 Mock, Shirley Boteler 347 Modern Art of the United States exhibition 56 “modern/colonial/capitalist world-system” 249n5 modernity 130, 412; binary model 156; Byzantine Empire 487; capitalist 493; and civilization 510; and coloniality 241–245, 248, 337, 338, 487, 584; contestation and disruption of 486; cultural imperialism 172; decolonial framework 11; to Euro-American empires 141, 241, 243; European colonial episteme 164, 175; invention of man in 130, 133; Japan’s 139; lineal temporality 156; logic of “human rights” 36; Meiji 143; neoliberal 34; public policies 157; renunciation of intrinsic meaning 174; and spatial abstraction 334; Western self-narrativizations 318, 323, 584; whiteness 129 Moe Laga 269

Moffatt, Tracey 229, 231, 232; Laudanum 231–232 Mofokeng, Santu 572; The Black Family Album: Look at me 570 Moi, Daniel arap 301 Molher Negra (Wagener) 559 Molina, Fray Alonso. de 254, 255 Molina, Natalia 25 Molobedu (Mahashe) 572, 573 Monge, Gaspar 336 Mongolique Soviétique (Kingelez) 112 Monroe doctrine 158, 161 Monson, William 391, 392 Montano, Linda 94 Monteiro, Carolina 560 Montes de Oca Vega, Mercedes 258 Moore, Jason W. 300, 301 moore, madison 267; Fabulous 267 Morningstar, Stephanie 185 Morrison, Toni 32, 506, 507, 526 Morton, Samuel 136 Mosquera, Gerardo 147 Moten, Fred 537 Motta, Carlos 504–506, 513; The Columbus Assembly 504, 508 Moxey, Keith 147 Mthombeni, James 569 Mudimbe, V. Y. 5, 571; The Invention of Africa 571 Mughal darbar 388 Muholi, Zanele: Faces and Phases 572 Mukherji, Parul Dave 202 Mullings, Beverley 278 Mundine, Mick 221 Muñoz, José Esteban 30, 267 Muñoz, Marissa 20 Munro, Jenny 221 Murawski, Mike 59 Murillo, Oscar 279 Murillo, William 510 Murray, Derek Conrad 551 Murray, Soraya 551 museum: accountability 8; acts of protest 9; are temples of whiteness 128–136; art 88, 97; attacks on MVPs 4; biased history 510; categories 130; as civic buildings 128; collections 98, 99, 132, 173, 355, 510, 557, 572; Colombian 511; colonial legacies 8; encyclopedic art 22, 198, 200; established throughout West 74; exhibition 154, 349; Florida 103; histories of taonga 64; Instagram account 7; institutional cultures of silence 7; from Islamic-hegemonic regions 172; as a kind of pilgrimage 131; New York City 584; objects 174,

602

Index 356–357; Palestinian 35; professionals and curators 10; studies 67, 557; as “theaters of pain” 131; of theft 132; transatlantic slave trade 37; truths 128–129; visitors to 99, 128, 131; Western 18 Museum Africa 570, 574 Museum of Contemporary Art Australia 229 Museum of Dissent 122 Museum of Fine Arts in Boston 483 Museum of Modern Art 85, 105 Museums Aotearoa Conference 62 Mussen, Maddy 51 Mutis, José Celestino 508–510, 512, 513 Mutu, Wangechi 73–76 MVPs (Most Valuable Philanthropists) 4 Mystery of Missing Tricontinental 320–321 myth making 344 Myth of the Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Lewis and Wigen) 198 Naeem, Asma 87 Nahua-Mixtec style 252 Nahuatl documents 254 Nahuatl writing 252, 254–256 Nana Buruku 535 Nandakumar Ray, Maharaja 388 narrative 568–569 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 93 National Gallery Singapore 359–360 National Heroes Monument 108 National Portrait Gallery, Washington 87 National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) 118 Natural History Museum 132, 136 nature, concept of 500 Neighbourhood Garden (Corbett) 77 Neimanis, Astrida 519, 528 Nelson, Charmaine A. 36 Neri Lewis, Cynthia 288 Neshat, Shirin 461 Nesting IV (Campos-Pons) 522, 522 Nettleton, Anitra 574 The New American Painting exhibition 56 New Manhattan (Kingelez) 109, 111–112 Newton, Isaac 338 Ngā Pou o te Kīngitanga 63 Nietzsche, Friedrich 134, 135, 174 Nightfall (Gonzales-Day) 90 Nippon Tower (Kingelez) 112 Niro, Shelley 233–236; Ghosts, Girls, Grandmas 233–234, 234, 236; The Rebel 234–235, 235, 236; The Shirt 235–236 Nixon, Rob 275

Nkrumah, Kwame 5 Noah 560 Nochlin, Linda 321 #NoDAPL movement 437 non-governmental organization (NGO) framework 122 “non-subjectifying” portraits 436 Nunes, Mark 358 Nuñez, Yanelys 121 Oaks, Dumbarton 402 Obama, Barack 152, 195, 302 oceanic feeling 523 Odundo, Magdalene 78 O’Gorman, Edmundo 334–335 Ohketeau Cultural Center 185–187 Ohmer, Sarah 531, 532 Okakura Kakuzō 143 Okhla Bird Sanctuary 428 Olamina, Lauren 76 On Painting (Alberti) 23 ‘ope,’concept of 67 orbis terrarium, notion of 335 Orientalism (Said) 321 The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man (Lubbock) 173 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt) 119 Orixá pantheon of deities 535 Ortiz, Amalia 281 Osterloh, Gina 432, 435–437, 440 Otálvaro-Hormillosa, Gigi 37 Otaño Gracia, Nahir I. 488 Otero Alcántara, Luis Manuel 121, 122, 125 “Pacification of the Araucania” 494 Padilla, Heberto 118 Padilla’s Shadow (Fusco) 118 “padres” and “savages,” concept of 300 Padrón, Ricardo 331, 336, 337 Palabras a las aguas (Words to the Waters) (Calfuqueo) 493–494, 494 Palabras a los Intelectuales (“Words to the Intellectuals”) (Castro) 118 Palais d’Hiroshima (Kingelez) 109, 111 Pan-African Black Power movement 533–534 Panchatantra 165 Panofsky, Erwin 175 Parchman Farm 564 Paris Is Burning (Livingston) 266–267 Paris Nouvel (Kingelez) 112 Parking Gallery 578 Pasifika Indigeneity: FAFSWAG performance 263–264, 265, 266–269, 271; LGBTQ cultural ideas 263; Westernism 266 Pastor Roces, Marian 466 Patel, Alpesh Kantilal 31

603

Index Paternosto, César 399, 402 Patricia Ready Gallery, Santiago, Chile 493 Patuwai, Tamati 298, 299, 303–306; The River Talks 299 Paul, Annie 279 “pause,” Pexa’s concept of 437 Payá, Oswaldo 121 pedagogies: decolonial 22, 225; of justice 33; radical 18, 33, 219, 223, 226, 297, 299, 302; The Redfern School of Displacement 219, 219–226 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire) 33, 333, 504 Pedri-Spade, Celeste 12, 36 Pelaez Lopez, Alan 13; “The Pledge of Allegiance” 13 Penn, Irving 569 Penones, H. Francisco 438 Péralte, Charlemagne 100 Pérez, Laura E. 7, 11, 12 Perez, Siddharta 435 Perry, Matthew C. 142, 147 Peter Blum Gallery, New York 130 Pexa, Christopher 437, 440 Pfeiffer, Paul 461 Phan, Thao Nguyen 274 phenomenon of “knowledge nullius” 434 Philip, M. NourbeSe 524, 527 Phillips, Ruth B. 78; Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture 78 Phoenix 170–171, 176, 178 Piaget, Jean 331 Picasso, Pablo 85, 207, 400; Desmoiselles d’Avignon 85 Pictures Generation 84 Pierce, Joseph 506 Pietz, William 174 Pinochet, Augusto 158, 495 Piper, Adrian 74 Pizarro, Francisco 398 plantationocene 421 Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity (Richards and Severtson) 544, 545, 545 Platoon 435 “The Pledge of Allegiance,” (Lopez) 13 Plum Tree Creek project 304 Plumwood, Val 305 Poetics of Relation (Glissant) 375 Pohl, John M. D. 252 Pollock, Jackson 27, 55 Ponce de León, Juan 381 Ponce, Martin Joseph 506 Pop Art 84 portrait of Marie’s body 452 Postclassic International Style 252

postcolonialism 316–318 Postcolonialism 2.0 322 Post, Frans 557, 558, 560, 561 Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader (Aloi and McHugh) 74 postscript 540–541 Presencia Negra: Portrait of Lucy Rengifo (Angulo) 512–513 A Presentation by Proxy (Tan) 354, 354, 358 Price-Mars, Jean 100 Principles of Art History (Wölfflin) 25 Probst, Peter 175 The Procession (Copenhagen and Locke) 279 Profiled series (Gonzales-Day) 86, 87 prophet Joseph 167 Prophet Muhammad 177 “provincializing Europe” 137n20 proximity, ethics of 416–417 Punto di Fuga (Martiel) 24 queer 15, 36, 86, 269, 317, 319, 325, 367–369, 371, 488, 490; Black 13, 506; decolonial and 16; Māori, and Pākehā 264; or transform hegemonic narratives 505; Pasifika 264, 269; performance genealogies 22, 263; and performance theory 267; realness of 267; theory 264, 266; transfemininity 267; US 263, 266–267; Western 269 Quijano, Aníbal 3, 5, 20, 27, 134, 157, 158 Quispe, Miguel Palacín 19 Rabaka, Reiland 129 race 7, 16–17, 25, 73, 76, 80, 121, 228, 229, 231, 274, 279, 374, 413–414; critical race theory 8, 19, 22, 209, 434, 483; and ethnicity 53–55, 299, 363; genocidal colonial race war 434; hiring practices 52–53; histories of 133; idea of 134; invention of 130, 133–136; mixed 376–379, 449, 451, 454; and racism 25, 86, 488; as relational concept 25; and secularism 129–130, 133; visual constructions of 374–375 Radical Hope (Lear) 309 radical pedagogies 18, 33, 219, 223, 226, 297, 299, 302; Climate Generation 297; colonialist capitalism 299–301; conceptualist water 305–306; decolonizing performances 298; Dharma Wheel of Hope 307–309, 308; geology of mankind 297; humanity’s “primary relation” to water 298–299; humans and nature, relationship between 298; millenial Gen Z or iGen 297; nuclear dread 306–307; performing trees

604

Index 301–303; politics of hope 298–299; The River Talks 303–305 Raheja, Michelle H. 478 Rajabzadeh, Shokoofeh 485 Rambaran-Olm, Mary 488 Ramirez D’Oleo, Dixa 33 Ramos Silva, Luciane 531, 532 “RAN-AWAY,” Quebec Gazette (Ritchie) 455 Ray, Gene 124 Raymond, Claire 22 The Realm of a Rain-Queen (Krige and Krige) 574–577 The Rebel (Niro) 234–235, 235, 236 reciprocity 18, 19, 33–34, 36, 67, 185, 189, 220, 224–225, 264, 297, 473, 488, 497–499, 589 The Redfern School of Displacement 219, 219–226; Deep Listening 224–225; knowledge 219–220; margins 225; positioning school of displacement 221–222; stories 223–224; temporary architecture of school 222 Red Star, Wendy 231 Reihana, Lisa 66 Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago exhibition catalog 54, 55, 276 ‘re Māorification’ 62 reparation 100, 133, 155, 355, 419, 507, 514 Repatriating the Object with No Shadow: Along, Against, Within, and Through 356 representation, notion of 359 Resnais, Alain 353, 357 Restall, Matthew 375 resurgent tactics, concept of 439–440 Réveillon fédéral (Kingelez) 109 Reyes, Ana María 11, 33, 36 Reynolds, Joshua 390 Rhodes Must Fall movement, South Africa 279, 316 Richards, Michael 37, 544–551; digital painting 544; haptic visuality 547; Let Me Entertain You 550, 550–551; A Loss of Faith Brings Vertigo 548; Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity 544, 545, 545; Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian 546, 548; video performance 544; Winged 548–549, 549 Rickard, Jolene 210, 215 Riegl, Alois 171; Stillfragen 171 “the right to exploit water,” concept of 495 Ritchie, Hugh 454 Ritskes, Eric 286 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia 7, 20, 158, 504 River Goddess Ganga 423 The River Talks (Patuwai) 299, 303–305

Rizo, Salvador 511, 514 Robinson, Cedric 278, 438 Robinson, Dylan 20 Rockefeller, Nelson 100 Rodríguez, Dylan 433, 438 Rodríguez, Prisca Dorcas Mojica 482, 483, 486, 489; For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts 482 Rodriguez, Sandy 210, 212, 213, 215; Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón 210; Mapa de la Región Fronteriza de Alta y Baja Califas 210, 211 Rojas Mix, Miguel 159, 161 Roosevelt, Theodore 135 Roronhiakewen 298 Rowe, Aimee Carrillo 317, 319 Rowe, John 399 Roy, Anrudhati 275 Ruins from Mukogawa River (Jiro) 306 Sacred Rock 400 Said, Edward W. 5, 317, 321; Orientalism 321 Sainte-Beuve, Charles 58 Salomon, Frank 401 Salon 94 gallery, New York 77 Sam, Jean Vilbrun Guillaume 100 Sánchez Galque, Andrés: The Gentlemen of Esmeraldas 377, 378 Sanders, Pharoah 78 Sandoval, Chela 32, 33, 243 Sanford, Amy Lee: Full Circle performance 460 San Isidro Movement (MSI) 119–125, 123 San Martín, Florencia 18, 92 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 275 Saunders, Tanya 531, 532 Savci, Evren 409 Schalk, Sami 73, 76; Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction 76 Schiebinger, Londa 453 Scholte, Bob 344 Schwartz, Sarah 209 The Scientific Center of Hospitalisation the SIDA (Kingelez) 109, 110–111, 111 “scourged back” image 27 Searching for California Hang Trees (GonzalesDay) 88, 89 Sears, Tamara 10, 31 Seated Shiva statue at Siddheswara Dham 324 The Secret Powers of Naming (LittlecrowRussell) 281 Sedira, Zineb 274, 280 Seed, Patricia 331, 336 See, Sarita Echavez 5, 31 Seler, Eduard 258 Senghor, Léopold 5

605

Index Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture (Edwards, Gosden and Phillips) 78 sensiotics 22 sentient life, Maya concept of 347 Sepúlveda, Ginés. de 134 Serpentine Galleries, London 79 seselelame 78 Sese Seko, Mobutu 106, 110 settler colonialism 5, 7, 25, 75–76, 153, 160, 185–187, 198, 200, 232–233, 235, 289, 316–317, 319, 321, 324, 419, 471, 488–489, 585 settlers 494 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) (Beuys) 302, 302 Severtson, Jeff: Plan to Achieve Escape Velocity 544–546, 545, 548 Sexual Encounters (Wallace) 268 sexuality, European concept of 269 Shahnama (Book of Kings) 165, 166 Shahrukh 169 Shani, Tai 279 Shapiro, Meyer 331 Sharpe, Christina 485, 533 Shaw, Angel 433 Shaw, George Bernard 537; The Black Girl in Search of God 537 Shaw, Wendy M. K. 18 She Always Knew of the Space In-Between (Campos-Pons) 522, 524 Shephard, Nick 577 Sheridan, Joe 298 Shih, Shu-mei 278, 374, 381; Minor Transnationalism 374 The Shirt (Niro) 235–236 Shompallwe or Shumpall 499 Shonibare, Yinka 74 Sidibé, Malick 569 Siebers, Tobin 30, 411 Sifford, Elena FitzPatrick 31, 208 Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berger) 363 Siliva Zulu – Silent Pictures Telling Stories exhibition 576 Silva, D. F.da 130, 133–135, 278, 338 Silveri, Rachel 57 Simpson, Audra 20, 32, 34; Islands of Decolonial Love 32 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake 32, 34 Simurgh: Book of Kings (Shahnama) 165; feather 175–179; Garuda 165; and Hoopoe 164–165, 167, 176; IslamicAbrahamic cosmology 167, 168; Kalila and Dimna 165; and Phoenix 170–171, 176, 178; Treatise on Birds 165; and Zal 165, 166

The Simurgh’s Shrill Cry (Suhrawardi) 167 Skidmore, Thomas 533 Slave Dance (Wagener) 563 slave dress 447; Dutchess’s Day in Court 448–449; headwrapping in Quebec and Nova Scotia 454; Marie-Thérèse-Zémire 450–452; Portrait of a Haitian Woman (Beaucourt) 450, 450; portrait of Marie’s body 452 Slave Market (Wagener) 559 slavery 58, 73, 80, 193, 213, 280, 317, 324; abolition of 555; afterlife of 279, 485, 533; aftermath of 275; Canadian 450; as civilizing mission 449; and genocide 546; history of 78; mental 322; peculiar institution 447; state-issued 371; Taíno 381; transatlantic 11, 447, 454 slow violence 22, 275–276, 484, 490n5 Smith, Adam 300, 301 Smith, Christen 532, 536 Smith, L.T. 11, 22, 65, 225, 251, 265, 266, 486; Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People 251, 265 Smith, Ross 224 Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art 168 Smith, Thomas 55 Smith, Trudi 472, 473 Snyder, Sharon L. 75 Solanas, Fernando 241–243, 245, 247; La Hora de los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) 247–248 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition 151 Sondergaard, Morten 473 South London Gallery, London 155 Souza, Keg de 22, 33, 218 space, concept of 336 spatial abstraction: as colonizing tool 331, 335–339; critiques of 333; homo erectus 331; and Invention of Americas 334–335; and modernity 334 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 5, 15, 325, 409, 414, 417 Sprinkle, Annie 94 Stanford exhibition 550, 553n23 Stanley, Henry Morton 106 Stark, Trevor 57 Stathopoulou, Katerina 151 Stella, Frank 55 Stephens, Michelle A. 55, 276 Stillfragen (Riegl) 171 Stoermer, Eugene F. 301, 309 Stoller, Paul 475 Stone, Rebecca 399 strategic essentialism 325

606

Index Strike MoMA campaign 584–589, 585 Strom, Mary Ellen 304, 305 Strother, Z. S. 110 Styres, Sandra 18, 210 Subterranean Sentiments of Belonging (Alonzo) 275 Sugar Coated (Leocaria) 555–556, 556, 562, 564 Sugar Palace 555 Suhrawardi, Shahab al-Din 167, 171; The Simurgh’s Shrill Cry 167 Sultan, Ibrahim 169 superior vs. inferior bodies 74 Sweet Sugarcane (Johnson) 277 Syjuco, Stephanie 435 Sylvester, Tomantha 191 Sze, Sarah 461 Szlaga, Radek 31, 363–366; Cliché and Chart 365 Tacca, Pietro di 503 Taino Sacred Arts 97–100 Taj Mahal installations 464, 465 “Talanoa,” Pacific concept of 269 Tamale, Sylvia 15, 19 Tanaka, Atsuko 464–466 Tan, Erika 31, 353–360; APA JIKA, The MisPlaced Comma 359–360, 360; Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You 353, 356–357; A Presentation by Proxy 354, 354, 358 Tanner, Henry 55 Tanuvasa, Jaycee 269 tapu 63, 65, 66, 68 Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian (Richards) 546, 548 Tatlin’s Whisper #6 120 Taussig, Michael 520, 522, 523 Taylor, Breonna 3, 49, 50, 61 teaching: Celeste Pedri-Spade 474; journey of making with Anishinaabe photographs 471, 475–477; lives and experiences of Anishinaabe women 470; re-making Anishinaabe photographs 471–473, 475 Te Awekotuku, Ngahuia 66 telejol 101 Te Māori exhibition 64 Terreiro de Candomblé (Auxiliadora) 533–535, 534, 540 Tezuka, Osamu 307 Thierbuch (Animal Book) 558 Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa 18 Third Cinema Manifesto 22, 241–243, 245, 248 Third Space 242–243, 245, 248 Third World 5, 108, 119, 242–243, 248, 305, 417, 461 Thoby-Marcelin, Philippe 100 Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (Delany) 154

Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha 367, 368 Tobin, Fowkes 392 tocapus 402 Todd, Zoe 19, 316, 348 Topkapi Palace Museum Library 166 Torres-García, Joaquín 156 To the Fields of Lilac (Corbett) 78, 79 trans 487; exclusionary feminists 270; gender 267; national histories 148; performance culture 269; regional exchanges 320; rights 264; temporal association 171; trans lives matter 268; women 228, 271n3 transdisciplinarity 243 transparency, Western notion of 21 trayenko 499–500 Treaty of Friendship and Amenity 142–143 Treaty of Ryswick 98 Treaty of Waitangi 305 Trotz, Alissa 281 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 11, 317, 319, 322 Trump, Donald 9, 152, 153, 156, 160, 207; “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) campaign 153, 156 Tuck, Eve 5, 133, 185, 224, 264, 271, 286, 299, 317, 318, 319, 419, 420, 485, 486 Turok, Antonio: The Collapse of the Conquistador Don Diego de Mazariegos 6 27N 119, 123–125, 124 Tyrell, Stacey 277; Dada’s Funeral 277 Uchida Yoshiaki 146 U.N. (1995) (Kingelez) 109 Un Caso de Reparación (Angulo Cortés) 504, 508–513, 509, 511 unchanged historical agent 147 Under the Same Sun museum exhibition 154 Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt (Durer) 336 UNESCO Paris exhibition 101 Ungunmerr-Baumann, Miriam-Rose 225 unpayable debt 132 Unseen exhibition 87 Untitled (Anacaona) (Báez) 17 Untitled (Breast and Bottle Feeding) (CamposPons) 520–521, 521 Uriona, Carlos 22, 190–191 Urioste, George L. 401 Useful Art Association 220 vaginal iconography 524 Valencia, Sayak 7, 27, 30 Valenzuela, Angela 208 Van Horn, Jennifer 29 “vanishing act,” America’s 434 Vargas Paillahueque, Cristián 495, 496

607

Index Vasari, Giorgio 23; Lives of the Artists 23 Vázquez, Rolando 241, 242 Vélez, Karin 290 Velório da Noiva/The Bride’s Wake (Auxiliadora) 533, 538 Verden-Zöller, Gerda 34 Vergès, Françoise 276, 278; A Decolonial Feminism 278 Versatility (El Anatsui) 27 Victoria and Albert Museum 353 Vidler, Anthony 338 Ville de Sete (Kingelez) 112 Ville Fantôme (Kingelez) 105, 109 Vinci, Leonardo. da 207 violence: anti-Asian 5; of British colonialism 305; capitalist 236; colonial 22, 29, 229–230, 274, 278, 280, 414–415, 437, 473, 478; continuum of 467; corporal 80; cosmological 299; divine 118; ecocide 18; ecological 305; environmental 275; epistemic 344, 414, 506; ethnocide 18; genocidal 18, 231; legal 118; oppressors’ 33; patriarchal 302; police 49, 497; real and epistemic state 174; revolutionary 117; settler colonialist 233, 234, 289; sexual 229, 453; slow 22, 275–276, 484, 490n5; state 119; state-sanctioned 4 Virgin Mary 366, 367, 378, 520, 523 visibility: of Blackness 17, 37, 546–547; politics of 432–435 visual culture 401, 407; Anishinaabe 471; and art 323; of Autonomous-era Americas 343; Central Mexican 377; characterization of 28–29; chronological progression 199; of Dutch Brazil 37; European 388; Indigenous 349; objects of 8, 10; pan-African Black Power movement 534; twentieth-century 434; types of 454 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 333, 344, 348 Vodun 371 Wagener, Zacharias 558, 560, 563; Molher Negra 559; Slave Dance 563; Slave Market 559; Thierbuch 563 Waititi, Rawiri 69 Wajda, Andrzej 370 Walcott, Derek 525 Walker, Kara 74 Wallace, Lee 268, 269; Sexual Encounters 268 Wallerstein, Immanuel 157, 158 Walley, Akiko 18 Wallmapu 494–499 Walsh, Catherine E. 108, 287, 337, 482 Walters Museum 424

Wanakawri 345 Warhol, Andy 207 War Memorial Museum (WMM) 264, 265 Warner, Rodell: Augumented Archive 277 “water rights” system 495 watery bodies 524–528, 526, 527 Watts, Vanessa 345, 348 Wealth of Nations (Smith) 300 Weems, Carrie Mae 135, 136; From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried 135 Weismantel, Mary 402 Weiss-Muller, Hannah 392 Wengrow, David 332, 333; The Dawn of Everything 332 Western art 11, 57, 143, 202, 274; category of 198, 201; history of 27, 54, 142, 197, 304; medieval period of 199; myth of 200–201; and non-Western art 198, 200, 202; “normative subject” of 27 Western civilization 196, 201 Western decolonial movement 106 Westernism 266 Western superiority 290 Weston, Edward 90, 92 whakapapa, Māori concept of 70 Wheel of Hope (Ikeda) 299, 308–309, 308 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 55 Whitaker, Cord J. 488 White Noise, American Prayer Rug (Galanin) 130, 130 white racial frame 25 Whitney Museum 583 Whitney Plantation Museum 370 Whittaker, Gordon 253, 254, 257, 259 Whyte, Kyle 289, 290 Wigen, Kären E. 198, 199; Myth of the Continents: A Critique of Metageography 198 Wilbur, Matika 231 wilderness landscapes 421–425 Wiley, Kehinde 74, 487 Williams, Aubrey 275 Williams, Bert 550 Williams, Joe 66 Wilson, Audra 8 Wilson, Fred 74, 512 Wilson-Heti, Elyssia 269 Wilson, Mabel O. 505, 506 Wilton, Joseph 390, 392, 393 Winged (Richards) 548–549, 549 Wolfe, James 392 Wolfe, Patrick 289, 319, 321 Wölfflin, Heinrich 25; Principles of Art History 25 Wool, Christopher 364 World’s Fair exhibition 434 Worringer, Wilhem 333

608

Index Wright, Christopher 475 Wright, Michelle M. 532, 536 writing: background 251–254; Codex Borgia 251–253, 258, 260, 260; concept of 251; logosyllabic 257, 257–259, 259, 260; Nahuatl 252, 254–256; texts and forms 251 Wu Mali 304, 305 Wynter, Sylvia 5, 8, 13–15, 19, 130, 133, 134, 160, 275, 278, 280 Yaffa painting (Mansour) 34, 35 Yamane Yūzō 145 Yamuna River 426–428 Yancy, George 25 Yang, K. Wayne 5, 133, 185, 264, 271, 286, 299, 318, 419, 420, 485, 486

Yanobe, Kenji 307 Yapp, Hentyle 31 Yemanjá 535 Yonan, Michael 29 #YoTambienExijo, Bruguera’s campaign 120 Your Monsters, Our Idols exhibition 504 Yusoff, Kathryn 276 Zain-ud-Din, Shaikh 388 Zakai, Shai 305; Concrete Creek 305 Zal 165, 166 Zavala, Adriana 210 Zavitsanos, Constantina 30 Żeromski, Stefan 370 Zimmerman, Lucy I. 504–506 Zoffany, Johan 386–388

609