summer reading notes 9

Gosine, Andil, 'Visual art after indenture: autoethnographic reflections', South Asian Studies, 33:1 (2017), pp. 105-12.

• Gosine is descendant of indenture (in Trinidad)
• 3 projects: WARDROBES, Our Holy Waters and Mine, After Indenture
• WARDROBES (2011-13): textile and metal based installation telling stories of Savitri (C19) and Jimmy (C21) 
• 'Cutlass': brooch in machete (sugarcane) shape
• 'Rum and Roti' bag
• 'Made with Love' doctor's scrubs with image of parents
• 'Ohrni' headscarf with replica of grandma's anchor tattoo
• Hoped final form of W. to be opera
• Included collabs with other diasporic-experienced artists, incl. Richard Fung, filmmaker
• "Both a private and public interrogation of desire, and its relationship to social trauma" (107)
• Our Holy Waters and Mine (2014)
• Bodies of water: Ganges, those crossed by indenture, and cities from Gosine's life
• Again: sociohistorical <--> personal, intimate: "they are entwined always, but neither is entirely productive of the other" (108) 
• Torabully 'coolitude': "de-essentialising geographical ties to India and biological ones to Indianness" (108)
• Glissant's créolité and Césaire's négritude
• After Indenture (2015-20)
• 'Coolitude' located in "shared experience of indentures, primarily their ship journeys and living conditions on plantations" (109)
• Goals: 
• Public digital archive of visual art re: indenture and post-ind.
• Analysis of art especially re: gender, class, sexuality
• Indenture and art in particular, under-researched
• Sharlene Khan, Wendy Nanan, Ian Harnarine, Roshini Kempadoo, Vannetta Seecharan, Kelly Sinnapah Mary 

Metzger, Sean, 'Roundtable: Imaging and imagining the Chinese Caribbean: Jeannette Kong, Maria Lau, and Laura Fong Prosper', Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 5 (2019), pp. 183-93.

• Jeannette Kong: Canadian filmmaker, Ms Chin Productions - Chinese Jamaicans
• Laura Fong Prosper - video and digital art
• Maria Lau - photography - Cuban Chinese
• Barthes Camera Lucida: stadium (what is immediately apparent to all viewers in image) and punctum (what attracts individual viewer's gaze, wounds them) --> "different orders of meaning" (184) as useful way to think of interacting identities
• Fong Prosper: grew up feeling 'Chinese-Panamanian', took cultural markers for granted -- visited China in 2012 and realised I wasn't Chinese but a hybrid
• "I like to use a lot of saturated color. I think that's my Caribbean heritage: the blue of the deep sea, the green jungle, the intense sun at noon." (186)
• Kong: pre-1980s, Chinese-Jamaicans were mainly all Hakka
• Grandfather arrived in Jam. 1920s
• Identity has expanded once moved to Canada: other Chinesenesses, other Caribbeannesses in community
• "The Chinese in Jamaica" (1957, 1963) by Lee Tom Yin, Jam. photographer Ray Chen's "The Shopkeepers" 
• 1920s-30s - mixed relationships between Jam. women and Chinese men (seen as "rich and virile" (192))

Attewell, Nadine, 'Looking in Stereo: school photography, interracial intimacy, and the pulse of the archive', ADVCATA, 4 (2018), pp. 19-44.

• Maria Lin Wong, Chinese-Liverpudlians (1989)
  
• "Charged sites of encounter between Chinese and other racialised people": Salt Spring Island (Wn Canada), Liverpool, HK
• Transnational resonations
• Tina Campt
• The school photos "disrupt conceptions of the nation (...) through drawing attention to the rhythmic dimensions of national becoming" (23) and imagined community
• Bhabha: nationalist idea of continuation/temporality --> pedagogy but undercut by repetition ('DissemiNation' essay)
• HK Diocesian Boys' School (1920s-1930s) students mainly Chinese but included other races such as European, South Asian, Jewish
• Similarly, 'Chinese Liverpool' must be linked to 'Black Liverpool' - lived in same ethnically diverse areas
• Often white women x men of color
• In BC, Canada, 1936: Chinese students banned from private school
• "Campt approaches the repetition that 'plagues' her archive in terms of black diasporic practices of 'creativity and improviastion', attending to the ways in which individuals actively take up, but also riff on, the sartorial and postural conventions of respectability." (27)
• Repetition in school photos as institutional" (27)
• Reproduction / self-perpetuation: across time (Caroline Levine (2015)) 
• Performative: ritual/ceremony, events made iterable into future
• "Schools, like families, are constituted through exchanges or networks of looks" (28)
• Chrononormativity/chronobiopolitics: making us feel all together/same: photo of today echoes photos of past. Both unified and specific.
• Brit private school 'esprit de corps': idea that each boy is a member of whole society and must act consciously to advance nation (Cecil Clementi, 1927) 
• Oxbridge --> imperial civil service
• Stuart Hall: colonial private schools as "formation and reproduction of the social elite" (Q28) (2017) 
• Students circulated among empire: school --> uni in metropole --> civil service
• Games, prefect system - building character = national progress
• 1922 Victoria, BC: Chinese striked to allow Chinese children into integrate schools
• Danger of recasting historical images as progressive racial mixing and 'diversity' rather than colonial violence
• HK, Liverpool schools endearingly called 'League of Nations' - curiosity, positive, appeal
• White self-congratulation for being 'egalitarian' 
• 'Harmony' as aesthetic
• Sunera Thobani (2007): post-WWII redefinition of whiteness (in Canada etc) as innocently tolerant and multicultural
• Multiculturalism must not be framed as response to Empire it claims to disavow, but as inheritance disseminated institutionally, effects of which we feel today in 'citizenship' ideas
• 'Listening' to a photo: Campt: "a method that reckons with the fissures, gaps, and interstices that emerge when we refuse to accept the 'truth' of images and archives the state seeks to proffer through its production of subjects posed to produce particular 'types' of regulated and regulatable subjects." (Q37) 
• "In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed describes subjects as 'orientation devices', that take us 'in some directions rather than others'" (66)
• Citation really as political and as love: Campt, Hall, Ahmed... showing her own intellectual lineage/respect
• Photo of 3 (Asian and Black) kids playing music on washtubs
• Chinese laundryman yellow peril trope
• G Formby song 'Chinese laundry blues' (1932)
• "Adapted to new ends, the bugle, washtubs, and ukulele facilitate a different kind of being together, one untethered from the promise of inclusion through which racialised people were (and are) enjoined to labor for the nation (as seamen, as laundrymen, as the entertainment." (40)

Goffe, Tao Leigh, 'Chop suey surplus: Chinese food, sex, and the political economy of Afro-Asia', Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 30 (2020), pp. 1-28

• American culture finds it hard to accept Afro-Asia because whiteness isn't included
• Juanita Hall, Af-Am actress best known for playing Chinese characters - even invested life savings into a Chinese restaurant
• Chop suey as mix, miscellany, hybrid/adapted
• Mme Liang in Flower Drum Song (1961) musical
• Cold War orientalism against COmmunist China - As-Ams as patriotic to US 
• "Born out of scarcity and legal exclusion, chop suey bears a history of the problem of digesting racial difference with the arrival of those racialised workers, their ahbits, their diets, their families." (5)
• The Afro-Chinese woman
• Food/eating/hunger as erotic
• Also politicised - she evades categorisation
• Black women as substitutes for Chinese feminine presence (due to restrictive immigration policies)
• "Colonial entanglement of the Black diasporic condition and the overseas Chinese" (6) 
• Chinese men as substitutes for Black labor, post-abolition --> married lcoal women esp. Black women, formed families

To be finished