Hall, Lisa Kahaleole, 'Navigating our own "Sea of islands": remapping a theoretical space for Hawaiian women and Indigenous feminism', Wicazo Sa Review, 24:2 (2009), pp. 15-38
- Centering Pacific islands due to erasure in modern feminist theory
- Hawaiian history almost entirely absent in uni curricula
- Denial of US imperial past
- Hawaii and Alaska as insets on US maps, other island territories never shown: spatial/visual closeness of HI which is actually very far away
- Black/white racial dichotomy erases Indigenous people -- trope of 'vanishing' Indig. culture/presence
- Indigeneity as 'blood quantum' -- have to be a certain % to be legally authentic and only applies to Indig. definition
- Imposing US ideas onto Hawaiian genealogy: 50% rule in 1920 and affects today because it gives you access to gov. resources and land
- Upon arrival, definition of native HIans was flux: sometimes characterised as Black
- HIan women sometimes classified as Native but rarely addressed in this framework; grouped in as 'Asian Pacific Islander' which is over-focused on immigrant status
- "Asian Americans have taken up the use of the APA etc. construction in an attempt to be inclusive, but the crucial difference between inclusion and appropriation is whether the included benefit equally from their inclusion." (23)
- Detrimental to statistics (until 2000 when API was split)
- PI group includes many types including migrants
- HIans stereotyped as 'savage', not Orientalised
- Thus Indig. HIan women reluctant to identify with feminism: white feminism; divisive to HIan solidarity overall
- Belief that patriarchy is a colonial imposition -- thus Indig. sovereignty will solve sexism.
- Ignores unique gendered dimension of Empire
- Can't go back to 'pure' precolonial culture
- Helping women helps whole of people
- Crucial interventions by Kanaka Maoli women:
- Lilikala Kame'elehiwa Native lands and foreign desires uses HIan-language sources; Na Wabine Kapu on role of women in precolonial HI; researching HIan sexuality - transcends heteronormativity
- Noenoe Silva Aloha betrayed
- S. E. Merry Colonising HI: Cultural powr of law on defining fornication as crime <--> licentiousness of Indig. women
- Leilani Holmes Ancestry of Experience: A journey into HIan ways of knowing
Bleichmar, Daniela, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago, 2012).
- Plants of Spanish empire; 12,000 images 1770s-1800s
- Central, S. America, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, N America, Philippines
- Expeditions (highly precarious) and people based in colonies --> extensive visual archive.
- At least 60 artists made these professionally
- Every ill. is collaborative: collectors, scientists, artists
- Visualisation projects "make global nature visible across distances (...) Visibility, in turn, would make imperial nature movable, knowable, and - ideally - governable." (7)
- C18 European (due to interchange) naturalists' epistemology was visual and they shared a visual language
- "Both science and empire aspired to universality and both found images important tools for extending their reach." (10)
- Visualising/making visible (eg acts of observation and preservation) vs. seeing (not many people actually saw the images made)
Bleichmar chapter 5: 'Visions of imperial nature: global white space, local color'
- Selective visibility: some aspects of empire made invisible
- Euro nat. hist.: botanical ills -- detail on white page, decontextualised (literally uprooted, "deracinated" (151))
- Larger cosmopolitan vocab: erases geographical specificity = "extractive vision of nature" (152)
- C18 Spanish American paintings that seek to embed native in specific locales with specific people
- Cuadros de mestizaje (miscegenation paintings)
- 6 canvases painted in Quito in 1783 by Vicente Alban, prob intended for Madrid's Nat Hist cabinet -- depict local humans posing next to showcases of a region's flora and fauna
- Rare detail and attention - fertility
- Includes cartouche of text identifying elements
- The central human is item A - a specimen (one example is an elite lady who has a Black female slave; 4 are Indig.)
- Refined Indians, urbane ladies, un-Hispanised ('savage') Indians -- 3 pairs/sets
- "In crucial contrast to the white space of nat. hist. illustration, these American paintings fill up the canvas with profusions of local color, insisting on the inalienable interconnectedness of the American territory, flora, fauna, and humane populations." (152)
- Decontextualised blank page ills. were meant to show exotic plants but didn't visually indicate geography: "18th century nat. hist. insisted on the centrality of visual epistemology but demanded that views remain partial." (154)
- Indices of the plants -- stand- ins for archive/repetitive
- Engravings showing scientific process separate fieldwork with collecting/analysis indoors
- Virgin of Guadalupe cult arose in C16 Mexico with Indig. converts --> C17, 18 became associated with "Creole elites and their growing sense of patriotic pride" (174)
- Casta paintings showing race dynamics (human 'types' -- social hierarchy/order) as well as nature
- 'Quadro de Hist. Nat, Civil, y Geografica del Reyno del Peru' by Luis Thiebaut, 1799 commissioned by elite J. I. Lequanda (enlightened intellectual concerned with local politics and econ)
- Large-scale: 115 x 325 cm
- Gift to Spanish admins: shows L's first hand experience of Peru and is a "microcosm" of Peru - "encyclopedic" (175)
- Many sections and subsections around a map of Peru and view of a mine at the center
- 32 human types: 16 civilised (many races represented but not Spaniards), 16 savages (noble savages) -- male and female pairs
- Overall 214 images inside and dense text in 'blank' spaces
- Test shows anthropocentricity
- Compartmentalised -- no clear narrative, relationships only implicit
Cao, Jing, 'Introduction to "A Conversation between Chinese artists and Mexican Painter David Alfaro Siqueiros"', ARTMargins, 9:1 (2020), pp. 83-91.
- October 1956:
- Exh. at Working People's Cultural Palace, Beijing org. by Mexican group National Front for Plastic Arts (FNAP)
- D. A. Siqueiros (1896-1974) and wife A. A. Bastar visit Beijing, S. talks to CAA artists (lecture and conversation)
- Org. by José Venturelli, Chilean artist who was 'ambassador' for leftist Lat-Ams to China.
- Moved to Beijing for Asian and Pacific Regions' Peace Conference and stayed to be the conf's secretary general
- China-Mexico radical interchange:
- Lu Xun (1931) promoted Diego Rivera, suggesting R. was suitable model for future of Chinese art (as opposed to Western modernism)
- 1933: Miguel Covarrubias and Rosa Rolanda visit Shanghai and met many intellectuals including Ye Qianyu
- 1956: fraying of Sino-Soviet relations --> China orients towards nonaligned countries in Asia, Africa, LatAm
- Siqueiros visit highly important - met Zhou Enlai (Bandung 1955: a new network for the third world) and Zhou Yang (who visited exh. and said muralism and print were "fundamental forms of art that is definitively intended for the masses" (Q96))
- "Realism cannot be in any way a recipe, a formula, something immobile, but a fact in perennial change, according to the transformation and development of the corresponding society." (Q Zhou Yang, 87)
- S. had similar ideas -- criticised Soviet Realism for being too static/lacking innovation
- CCP shift from S Realism to nativist traditions -- from Jiang Feng to guohua's adaptation
- 1956 June 13: Hundred Floewrs Movement -- Liu Dingyi of Propaganda Dept telling artists to be more diverse --> tension between styles, which style is more socialist?
- Convo with CAA artists:
- Dong Xiwen - every country should have its own style
- Li Zongjin - USSR art system is too narrow, doesnt allow debate
- S: Artists should pay attention to technological development eg new paints
- Wang Qi: new uses for old tools - Communist themes
Conversation trans. Feng Xiangsheng
- Participants incl: Ye Qianyu, Wu Zuoren, Cai Ruohong, Shao Yu, Ni Yide, Dong Xiwen, Wang Xun, Wang Qi, Zheng Wuzhen, Li Zongjin, Li Hua, Ye Fu, etc
- S: Mexican artists oppose Euro avant-garde ("the Paris school" (Q93))
- Realism develops -- eg middle ages to Renaissance perspective -- and we are still a part of it
- Abstractionists believe there is nothing left to do with realism so changed direction
- Soviet art is boring -- too fixed, meaningless
- S on realism:
- Direct realism: study of all of a person incl. internal feelings
- Objective method: photos, someone's political ideas...
- Spirit realism: looking at every angle -- eg Chinese landscape
- Realist imagination: grounding fantasy in reality
- Wang Qi: masses might not understand a complex/composite work like S's Fascist Process -- need explanation
- Painting should be immediately legible; most important is "integrity and harmony" (Q95)
- Dong Xiwen on copying past masters being boring: "Certainly we can't use past artists' feelings in place of our own feelings" (Q96)
- We shouldn't be too derivative/collage-like -- artists should develop own style
- Li Zongjin: problem of Soviet art is "it has let go of the power within visual language" (Q97)
- But Mexican art lacks lifelike, invigorating imagery
- S: artistic freedom/liberal pluralism isnt the issue -- "the important thing is to give artists the concepts to advance; give them a measure of strength, encourage them. Give this kind of communitarian spirit to the artists." (Q98)
- "'Simple' and 'clear' has ruined Soviet art. Soviet artists have forgotten how to use emotion to speak, to use the forms of plastic arts to speak." (Q99)
Ervin, Lorenzo Kom'boa, 'Authoritarian Leftists: Kill the Cop in your Head', Black Autonomy (April 1996)
- (LKE: b. 1947, former BPP member, anti-Vietnam war, became anarchist while incarcerated in the 1970s)
- Open letter to Euro-American leftists (MLs and MLMs)
- White privilege in capitalist US "is a prime factor in the creation and maintenance of bourgeois ideology in the minds of many whites of various classes"
- Violent and nonviolent self defense is a basic Black human right
- White-led 'vanguard' in US dosen't do justice to Black and POC
- COINTELPRO crushed Black leftist groups and white led groups like Progressive Labor Party, Revolutionary Union didn't help / support -- instead asserted 'vanguardship'
- Want to convert people to "rigid political theology" instead of building coalition -- sectarianism, competition to 'win' meaning white left is "actively re-inventing and re-enforcing the very social, political, and economic relations you claim to be against."
- American 'survival of fittest' and alienated culture -- which they avoid rejecting but simultaneously appropriate POC cultures = "left-wing white supremacy"
- Eurocentric, ahistorical race analysis
- Black people have independent ideas of socialism/mutual aid -- eg BPP, Underground railroad -- not just a Euro thing
- Rejecting Joseph Green's condemnation of anarchism as unable to function on larger scales (1995)
- Spanish civil war CNT + FAI as examples of anarchism succeeding: failures were:
- Not exterminating fascists
- Underestimated people who joined liberal gov.
- No network abroad to support
- Today, anarchists are most involved in grassroots issues
- A. is rooted in practice not empty theory like Green
- "Any theory which cannot, at the very least be demonstrated in miniature scale (with the current reality of the economically, socially, and militarily imposed limitations of capitalist/white sup.ist society taken into consideration) in daily life is not even worth serious discussion because it is rigid dogma of the worst kind"
- State planning/MLism hasn't dealt with power dynamic between working class and middle class 'vanguard' who seize state power 'for' wc
- Reassertion of white sup. and patriarchy interpersonally in leftist orgs
- Last 30 years have seen creation of Black elite -- liberal and conservative "puppets of the white power structure" who themselves have little actual power or control
- White leftists criticised 'Million Man March' (1995) - an Af-Am protest (criticised for sexism and for being led by Louis Farrakhan who was hugely antisemitic)
- Actually, Black women were in attendance -- ignored Farrakhan saying it was male-only
- MMM was opportunity to educate people on leftist ideas
- "The difference between revolutionary Black nationalists (like Huey P. Newton and the BPP) and cultural nationalists (like Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam) is that we see our nationalism as a specific tool to defend ourselves from groups and indivs. (...) not as an exclusive or single means of liberation."
- Black autonomists reject vanguardism because it doesn't build productive relationships
- "The primary contradiction within the wc is that of racial stratification as a class weapon of the bourg. and capitalists against the wc as a whole" -- which white people don't see
- What is 'dictatorship of proletariat' for white -led groups? Will Black people be empowered?
- Black autonomy = demand separate nation state? Actually we reject nation statism.
Morgan, Jo-Ann, The Black Arts Movement and the BPP in American Visual Culture (New York, 2019)
- 1965-72: Spiral, OBAC, AfriCOBRA
- Oakland Museum exh 1968: 'New perspectives on Black art' and impact of BPP on local art scene
- Photography: Stephen Shames, Ilka Hartmann
- Billy X. Jennings' It's About Time archive
- Huey Newton Collection, Green Library Stanford
- Cleaver had the idea to coordinate with Berkeley anti-war activists
- Cleaver coll. at Bancroft Lib, UCB
- Beverly Axelrod, white lawyer whose role is overlooked - linked Black militants with white radicals
- Emory Douglas: designer and artist for BP newspapers
- Pioneered pig-like policemen cartoons
- BAM had initially been literary
- Spiral incl. Charles Alston, Romare Bearden - NYC
- AfriCOBRA: African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists- Chicago
- BPP women: Kathleen Neal (Cleaver's wife), Angela Davis
- Davidson Lib at UCSB: Bay Area BPP collection
- Richard Aoki's newspapers archive
- LA center for study of political graphics --> posters
- Wall of Respect - community mural made by OBAC (org of Black Am. culture) --> formed AfriCOBRA a year later
- Idea of 'Black art' pioneered by Amiri Baraka in early 1960s
- Baraka founded BART/S (Black arts repertory theatre/school) Harlem in 1965
- 1968, Larry Neal article 'the Black Arts Movement': "The BAM is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of black America. In order to perform this task, the BAM proposes a radical reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology." (Q4-5)
- Henry Ossawa Tanner - painter always labelled a 'Negro artist'
- Harlem Ren. as a cautionary tale: didn't engage working class audiences, funded by white philanthropists
- Pressure to conform to Modernism while keeping enough ethnic flavor to be distinctive / authentic
- Ironic as Cubist breakthrough was done by appropriating African art
- Black presence in Federal Art Project of WPA
Ch3: AfriCOBRA: Forging a Black aesthetic
- Initial core: Jeff Donaldson, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Gerald Williams - local established artists
- By 1970 Nat'l exh. in Harlem, they were 10 people
- "Predicated on a premise that 'Black visual art' has innate and intrinsic creative components characteristic of our ethnic group'" (Q BJH 1973, 36)
- Wanted to empower Black audience -- from protest to prescription (engendering progress)
- "Jarrell considered art a 'visual language'. Therefore art that emerged from black culture should be based on a syntax that is encoded yet understandable to black people" (Q Mary DePillars, 37)
- Bright colors, human figure, lost and found line, lettering, images that identified sociopolitical conditions (acc. to BJH) FORMALISM
- 'Cool-ade' (Kool-aid) colors: "orange, strawberry, cherry, lemon, lime, and grape" (BJH, Q37)
- Donaldson: "color as bright and as real as the color dealing on the streets of Watts and the South Side" (Q37)
- AfriCOBRA met 2x monthly to discuss aesthetics and philosophy, and set themes for art (eg first theme: Black Family)
- Jae Jarrell (fashion designer): Ebony Family dress
- Connection to 'Black classical music' of jazz
- Honored Black revolutionaries: Malcolm X, BPs, MLK, Davis, etc
- Adopting 'Africa' as homeland
- Malcolm X launching a Black 'cultural revolution': appropriation of African hair and clothes, baby names -- alternative to eurocentrism = Afrocentrism
- Aim for mass-reproduction: printing versions of art
- Also BJH was printmaker by craft
- Elizabeth Catlett: independently advancing accessible art and Black aesthetic
- Travelled to Mexico in 1947 to work with Mexican printmakers at Taller de Grafica Popular
- Made a series of 15 linocuts: 'The Negro Woman' ft. historical figures and everyday women
- BJH visited Catlett in Mx City in 1968, around Olympics -- later made print 'Unite' responding to raised fist salute
- Catlett explicitly made art with message to incite action and promote liberation
Tbc - BPP chapters
