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

summer reading notes 8: ayahs; afro-cuban/afro-american network; coolie literature; Chinese anarcho-feminism; UK punk zines

 Robinson, Olivia, 'Travelling Ayahs of the 19th and 20th centuries: global networks and mobilisation of agency', History Workshop Journal, 86 (2018), pp. 44-66.

• Thousands of ayahs, amahs 1890s-1930s arrived in UK
• Either permanently employed or hired just for sea voyage
• Challenging idea of ayah as passive - had agency
• Ayahs neither passengers nor crew - peripheral, Othered position
• "Intimate frontiers of empire"  (44) - Ann Laura Stoler on domestic as sociocultural space where race was negotiated and crucial role of servants in colony
• 3 sites of empire: colony - at sea - metropole
• India, Ceylon, HK, Sg, Malaya, China treaty ports
• Brit women moving to colonies to marry Brit men (from late 1850s) -- otherwise they would marry locals (dangerous)
• 1869 Suez Canal made eastbound trips easier
• In India, domestic service was male-dominated until 1930. Idea of childcare as 'woman's job' was imposed by British women -- created new employment sector for local women
• Childcare = most important role, proximity with mistress 
• Infants only - older children with British nurse or sent back to UK
• Being 'part of family' also reinforced loyalty
• Infantilising colonial natives - Brit mistresses (memsahib) must treat native servants like children
• But dilemma of ayah raising white children
• Need constant surveillance / policing of servants
• Thus both central and peripheral
• On ship, ayah couldn't travel First Class with family and white servant - relegated to mixed-gender deck (worst ticket)
• No bed: ayah needed to bring own mattress and overall seregation from family despite doing all the childcare
• 1920s got better but formalised distance - eg own toilets
• No names on passenger list - just 'Ayah', literally belonging to employers 
• Ayah's Home, London existed for many years before being taken over by Ldn City Mission (evangelists) - excl. for non-white nannies
• Only sources are Brit managers - racialised, infantilising 
• Idea of 'family unit' with superintendent and wife as 'parents' 
• Commercial and expensive (paid for by employer wife)
• Ayahs needed character references and could be expelled for misbehavior - not 'charity' 
• 12 instances of ayahs unable to return home - India Office denied responsibility, sent them to Ayah's Home to sort it out (find a new family)
• Resemblance to New Poor Law - out of sight, out of mind
• Overall Ayah never allowed to stay in the UK
• Overly victimising narrative - Ayahs found ways to capitalise on situation
• Many Ayahs specifically worked only on ships - hired out by agencies
• Much skill needed: able to serve and travel
• Some went to Australia, Americas etc - "sophisticated recruitment infrastructure" (54), much demand
• Also private ads: mistresses wanting Ayahs or trying to get new family for current Ayah
• Traveling ayahs were diverse whereas local (non-travelling) ayahs were sweeper caste and married to family's sweeper
• Many widows
• Very high wages compared to regular ayahs - very valued, kept considerable savings 
• Could negotiate or demand/set own payment
• Regularly went to UK - not 'lost'
• Sometimes sole adult carer of kids
• Not afraid to lodge complaints with authorities
• Ayah's Home stay seen as inevitable downtime between jobs - some did extra work (textiles, selling items between UK and colony) 
• Home segreg. by ethnicity but they mingled socially: games, sharing food 

Guridy, Frank Andre, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African-Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapell Hill, 2010)

Introduction

• Juan René Betancourt: anti-racist activist in Cuba since 1940s
• Castro liberates Cuba 1959: Betancourt participated in new gov's anti discrimination efforts- but clashed and exiled
• Critiqued gov's treatment of Afro-Cubans in 'Castro & the Cuban N-gro' (1961) - appealing to Af-Ams
• Af-Cub and Af-Am exchange history based on shared 'colored'/diasporic identity
• Black, upwardly mobile elite non-state
• Cuba's geog. proximity = unique
• Affected by Cold War - new idea of 'Third World' and 'wretched of the earth' liberation struggles who "framed their demands within the dominant discourse of nationalism" which "overshadowed forms of solidarity that were not driven by the precepts of nat'ism" (2) 
• Cuban Rev's explicit identification with African struggles = legitimacy of nation
• Rise of new Af-Cub/Am network (1959-60) initiated by Cub gov to get Af-Am support: incl Amiri Baraka
• Castro visits Harlem, Malcolm X in 1960
• Guridy examines pre-Castro network (mainly first half of C20)
• Diaspora identification did not contradict nationalism
• "We have yet to fully investigate how transnational modes of belonging are created and maintained" (4)
• Segregation and imperialism impelled Black people to develop alternative networks - material benefit eg education, political support
• 'Routes' not 'roots' (slavery) which doesn't necessarily centralise African continental homeland
• James Clifford
• Not 'Black internationalism', not simple but v. varied
• Diaspora in practice
• Af-Cub patriots/nat'ists looked to Booker T Washington's Tuskegee Institute as role model
• Diaspora-making process: translations and misunderstandings
• 'US-Caribbean world': trade networks C18 --> war of 1898 when US started intervening more
• Linked northeastern US cities to southern US & Carib 
• Increased tourism in 1910s-30s, corporate transport/travel (steamships)
• Armed intervention and US cultural spread (protestantism, consumerism) incl. Panama Canal
• Cuba prominent due to size and proximity = appeal to US 
• Range of social actors with diff. interests in US presence
• Black people were main laborers, incl.  inter-island migration
• Happening alongside US 'great migration' which included Anglophone Carib. 
• Garveyism would be born here
•  US presence in Cuba shaped/encouraged construction of nat'l identity and of race
• "Cross-fertilisation" (10) 
• Cuba had a KKK from 1920s+ 
• Recreation and leisure segreg. in Cuba - under-studied
• Af-Cubs made own communities - 'sociedades de color' eg Club Atenas - elite
• Diaspora felt they were more civilised than Africans and wanted to 'uplift' Black race - esp Af-Ams (imperialism) 
• Garvey's UNIA (Universal N-gro Improvement Association) vibrant performance culture
• Cuba had most UNIA divisions outside USA 
• Harlem Ren <----> Afrocubanismo: artists taking up ethnic forms /motifs
• Black tourism 1930s - 50s to Cuba - adapting to racial exclusion in leisure industry

Goffe, Tao Leigh, 'Intimate Occupations: The Afterlife of the "Coolie"', Journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists, 22:1 (2014), pp. 53-61.

• 2 conemp novels: The Pagoda by P Powell (1998), The Book of Salt by M Truong (2003) - queering the colonial archive, giving voice
• The 'undocumented' means "to be rendered an 'impossible subject'" (Mae Ngai, 2004) - illegality, foreignness 
• Silence of coolies in the archive - eg intimacy, interiority
• Despite coolies pre-occupying/figuring in Euro colonial imaginary of C19
• The origin of word 'coolie' is uncertain - like the coolie himself
• Gujarati worker caste 'koli'? 
• Portuguese 'cule' - laborer in India? 
• Mandarin 'ku li' bitter strength? 
• Unskilled, inscrutable, desexualised (male)
• Coolies supposed to return after contract but in Carib they were 'buffer race' between white/Black post-slavery so encouraged to settle
• Women brought over to form families
• Usually derogative - reclaimed
• H. T. Tsing And China has hands: a Chinese coolie odyssey (1937)
• David Dabydeen Coolie Odyssey (1988)
• Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman (2013)
• Khal Torabully - 'coolitude' (2002) - answer to 'negritude' 
• Coolie as active agent
• Lisa Lowe The intimacies of 4 continents (2006)
• Lisa Yun The coolie speaks (Cuba) (2010)
• Denise Helly A Hidden history of the Chinese in Cuba (1997)
• Chinese coolies subverted, protested, escaped -not passive
• Chinese gov ended 'coolie' trade, 1874
• Moon-Ho Jung Coolies  and Cane (2006)
• Richard Jean So dissertation 'Coolie democracy 1925-1955' (2009)
• Fiction intervenes in colonial records 
• Queering as "a term for betraying what ought to remain concealed" (55)
• Butler's analysis of N. Larsen Passing: "'queering' works as the exposure within language  - an exposure that disrupts the repressive surface of language - of both sexuality and race" (Q55)
• The Pagoda: cross-dressing/trans shopkeeper Lowe in late C19 Jamaica - if there were women coolies, would they have been recorded?
• Book of Salt - Viet cook, Binh, works for Gertrude Stein in Paris and is gay
• Both concern afterlife of coolie experience although are not actually coolies (plantation labor) 
• David Eng (2008): we shouldn't see historical ethnic texts as correcting/remedying - Truong's historical misnaming/playfulness shows it doesn't matter whether or not the story actually happened/is based in truth. 
• Both chars have sexual relationships with Black ppl - kinship in marginalisation, a connection not founded with white ppl
• "In The Pagoda and The Book of Salt, the 'coolie' does not just speak, the 'coolie' screams (...) This scream straddles the boundary between pleasure and pain" (56)
• 3 'intimate occupations': 
• 'Unskilled' laborer identity: marginal, yet crucial to the economy - esp as both handle food (store owner and cook) 
• Colonial settings pre-US occupation: 1890s British Jamaica, 1930s French Vietnam
• Occupying space in colonial archive
• --> "Refusing to assimilate to fixed constructions of race, gender, and sexuality" (57)
• They actually have much skill and power and control in their jobs
• 'Chiney' groceries in Jamaica: social space; known to extend credit more generously
• Yet marginalised due to class, race, sexuality
• Not rewriting the past: "meditate on teh production of history and the role of power" (59)
• In the end, Binh and Lowe are freed from their occupations

Liu, Lydia H., R. E. Karl,  and D. Ko (eds.), The Birth of Chinese feminism: essential texts in transnational theory (New York, 2013) unfinished

Introduction

• 'The Women's Bell' (1903), Jin Tianhe (male) - seen as first Chinese feminist manifesto, very popular and influential 
• He-Yin Zhen (anarcho-feminist, founder of Natural Justice journal) critiqued male feminists in 1907-8 as "pursuit of self-distinction in the name of women's liberation" (Q2)
• Modelling themselves on Wn/modern societies
• "As far as Jin Tianhe was concerned, women's emancipation was part of a larger project of enlightenment and national self-strengthening, coded either 'male' or 'patriarchal'" (7)
• 'Modern woman' in Shanghai ads = progress
• Tianyi/Nat Justice pub by Society for the Restoration of Women's Rights, Tokyo
• Featured first Chinese trans. of Communist Manifesto! (1908)
• For HYZ: feminism "was the beginning and outcome of a total social revolution that would abolish the state and private property to bring about true social equality" (7) and anticapitalist
• Plurality and contradictions of Chinese feminisms
• Defies East/West binary
• HYZ's analysis was totalising: everything is connected
• 'Woman' as "transhistorical global category (...) constituted through scholarship, ritual, law, and social and labor practices over time" (9)
• "History is formed by a continuously reproduced injustice in the manner of what the Annales school of French historians would come to call the longue durée" (9)
• Woman = "product of historical social relations" (10)
• Political ontology
• Analytical category of Nannü (男女) - a framework to understand this totality/structure and always-gendered life (more comprehensive than the word 'gender')
• Shengji / livelihood - more than 'class'
• Nannü is single concept: both noun and adjective, which "lies at the foundation of all patriarchal abstractions and markings of distinction." (11) - hard to translate
• HYZ's own moment was porous for language : influences from Jp and W, pioneering new vernacular
• "Far more productive is to tease out the theoretical resonances in the spaces opened up between nannü and 'gender' or any such categories in contemp. feminist theories, which have always passed back and forth through a multiplicity of mod. langs." (12)
• "Her critique demonstrates that the normative function of nannü is not only to create 'gendered' identities (which it also does) but also to introduce primary distinctions through socioeconomic abstractions such as the external and the internal, or to such cosmic abstractions as yang and yin" (14)
• No biological view of sexual differnce, unlike in Europe. So there was no need for HYZ to oppose this on the sex/gender differention aspect, like Europeans had to.
• Critique from "within -- and against -- the indig. Confucian tradition, especially its theories of human nature" (15)

Ripped, torn, and cut: pop, politics, and punk fanzines from 1976, ed. Subcultures Network (Manchester, 2018). Unfinished

Introduction: adventures in reality, why (punk) fanzines matter - M. Worley, K. Gildart, A. Gough-Yates, S. Lincoln, B. Osgerby, L Robinson, J Street, P Webb

• UK's first self-defined punk fanzine: Sniffin' Glue by Mark Perry, 1976
• Fanzines as "residues of youthful agency" (2)
• Cut and paste imagery, Xeroxed/Roneo-stencilled, sold for low cost at gigs, schools, record shops
• Increasingly political and experimental - eg Lucy Whitman JOLT (1977) 
• Help map shifts from 1976-77 punk 'moment' to 1980s culture
• Shows punk in provinces and outside London - diverse
• Nancy Fraser, 'subaltern counterpublic' - alternate, oppositional
• Teal Triggs Fanzines (2010); Stephen Duncombe Notes from the Underground: Zines and the politics of alt. culture (2008) 
• History of zines:
• 1930s sci-fi, US and Uk
• Expanded across cultural spheres
• Punk zines' visual language essential to aesthetic
• Riot grrrl material @ Fales library, NY
• Zines in BL, V&A, Manchester District Music Archive, Bristol Arch Records

summer reading notes 7: Hawaiian feminism; Spanish imperial botany; Mexican artists in Maoist China; Black anarchism; Black Panther visual culture

 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

summer reading notes 6: tuck and yang

Eve Tuck: Associate Prof of Critical Race & Indigenous Studies at UToronto & works on education; indigenous Alaskan

K. Wayne Yang: Associate Prof, UC San Diego Ethnic studies, focuses on community/place and 'ghetto colonialism'. 

Link to the paper: here.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang, 'Decolonisation is not a metaphor', Decolonisation: Indigeneity, Education, and Society, 1:1 (2012), pp. 1-40.

• Hegemony of settler-colonial framework
• Superficial adoption of 'decolonise' into education and humanities - it is not interchangeable with any other social justice ideal
• Erasure of indigenous people and history
• "When metaphor enters decolonisation, it kills the very possibility of decolonisation; it recenters whiteness, it recenters theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future." (3)
• "Solidarity is an uneasy, reserved, and unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflict." (3)
• 2 main forms of colonialism: external (exogenous/exploitation) = the extraction of resources to feed First World; internal = within 'domestic' borders of imperial nation - control, policing, "both structural and interpersonal" (5)
• Settler colonialism is both: total appropriation
• Within settler colonisation, the most important thing is land
• Involves disappearing indigenous and use of slavery (people without land whose bodies/selves are property, who can exploit the land)
• Settlers are not immigrants: they become the law, but immigrants adapt/assimilate
• "Each of the features of settler colonialism in the US context -- empire, settlement, and internal colony -- make it a site of contradictory decolonial desires." (8)
• "Decolonisation as a metaphor allows people to equivocate" these (8)
• Settler moves to innocence -- avoiding culpability
• Eg claiming to have Native ancestry: misunderstanding of Native racialisation as subtractive, disappearing with each generation from 'authenticity'
• "An anti-colonial critique is not the same as a decolonising framework: anticolonial critique often celebrates empowered postcolonial subjects who seize denied privileges from the metropole. This anti-to-post-colonial project doesn't strive to undo colonialism but rather to remake it and subvert it." (19)
• Paulo Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• Liberation found in the mind of the oppressed -- unlike Fanon, not specifically situated in colonial framework
• "Fanon positions decolonisation as chaotic, an unclean break from a colonial condition that is already over-determined by the violence of the coloniser and unresolved in its possible futures." (20)
• Decolonisation "is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of 'helping' the at-risk and suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes. (...) Decolonisation specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life" (21) ie material demands
• Curriculum reform is more like settler harm reduction/white harm reduction -- only a stopgap
• Us-based calls for redistribution of wealth ignores the wealth/land originally belonged to Natives and isn't for giving away
• eg Occupy movement
• Settler moves to innocence = reconciliation ≠ decolonisation = guiding towards unsettling innocence
• Incommensurability: we don't need to answer to/satisfy settlers. This is about Indigenous futures. 

update to blog format

by the way, to the handful of people who apparently still view my posts, I have updated my about page to be the following: 

this blog was never a way for me to vocalise fully-formed ideas and much more of a journal. but as of recent months/years, it has become much more of a place for me to write stuff down without losing it (i especially plan to continue to use it as a place to write down notes from readings i do outside of curricular frameworks). 

summer reading notes 5: edX japanese books 3/3 + degrowth

Module 3 - the Tale of Genji (c11)

• Written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu and has appeared in every book format and reading experience available
• Texts handwritten / copied until C17
• Oldest surviving text is C12 (~100 years after Mursaki finished all 54 chapters) - elaborate calligraphy and art
• Alternating text-image, symbiotic
• Next oldest is c13: only 1 chapter - each chapter bound individually and kept in special cabinets
• 6x6 inches when closed
• Section binding (testuyoso) with string - easy to take apart and redo
• Separate allowed easy lending/exchange/copy
• Led to earliest examples of book cover design
• Mulberry paper, decorated
• Suhama (stylised sandbar) - yellow pigment
• Suminagashi (flowing ink) - patterns of ink, marble-like
• These pertain to chapter 12 set in Suma by the sea, sense of temporality (nostalgia), Buddhist idea of life as fleeting, incense smoke in temple = paperscape (worlds beneath script)
• Calligraphy also affective
• Intimate reading experience - immersive

Genji albums: individual leaves and paintings and excerpts from novel

• Popular in early modern period
• Lavish - for elite women as part of wedding trousseau
• Oldest from 1510: 1 painting and text per chapter
• By Tosa Mitsunobu, famous court artist and 6 prominent calligraphers
• Warrior family in Western Japan interested in literature
• Includes a post-C17 frontispiece painting showing lady M at the temple where she wrote the book, beginning in the back of a sutra with chapters 12-13 & inspired by the moon: welcomes reader into the tale
• Using shikishi (colored papers/poem sheets) - square shape: 5 colors alternating in strict order
• Resemble imported Chinese paper - C16 saw juxtapositions of CN/JP aesthetics
• Aesthetics/form help convey atmosphere of scene
• The album does not replace the novel - for readers already familiar
• Leaves can be removed and pasted onto new formats, hanging scrolls, screens, new albums etc
• Actually remounted in 1998 into 'accordion' style

First printed edition: c17

• Previous printed works focused on Buddhism
• Absence of true commercial publishing industry before 1600
• Also issues with aesthetics of Genji calligraphy - difficult to translate into print
• 1619 saw attempts to mimick brush writing in movable type - but woodblock printing was more practical and could include pictures
• First woodblock Genji: 'Illustrated tale of Genji' (Eiri Genji Monogatari), 1650 Kyoto
• Illustrations by Yamamoto Shunsho, 222 images that established seminal new iconography
• Included commentaries, genealogy, poetry index, and sequel by another author -- comprehensive
• Print allowed different versions of Genji to be introduced to much wider readership
• Center of publishing world shifted to Edo and prospered in C18 - audience: townspeople and samurai

Inaka Genji (A Fraudulent Murasaki's Rustic Genji) - bestselling in c19, by Ryutei Tanehiko

• Borrows structure, characters, and some lines to create new work, set in C15 Ashikaga shogunate
• Draws on vernacular: ancient warrior tales, contemporary kabuki and joruri puppet theatre
• Gory violence, twists
• 76 volumes - serialised over 13 years (1829-42), until censored and Tanehiko died
• Wasn't intended to be so long, but was very popular
• Images by famous artist Utagawa Unisada 
• Colorful
• Karazuri (empty printing) - giving it an invisible texture that mimicks luxurious textile volumes owned by elite
• Includes brown specks - mimicking gold decoration on paper
• Imagining Edo-period woman author: Ofuji
• Purple on her robe ('murasaki') links her to Murasaki - she is the fraudulent version of her real counterpart
• Volumes are paired: 2 per chapter, 上 and 下, visually complementary on covers
• Chapters 18-19 (4 vols) roughly correspond to original chapters 12-13 written first by Lady M: covers are connected
• Motifs relating to season of chapters' publication - plum tree
• Book bound using 'pouch binding' (fukurotoji) technique
• Book format: gokan (combined booklets)
• Booklets (maki/kan) bound together into 1 volume
• Booklets = 5 folded pouches, 10 pages - standard size for books until 1807, known as kibyoshi 'yellow-backs''
• Gokan = 2 kibyoshi, double
• Development of book formats
• Mikaeshi/mikaeshi-e: frontispiece (inner front cover) with bibliographic information, in a playful way
• Introduction for each chapter in the voice of Tanehiko
• Kuchi-e: frontispiece illustration, separated from text by frame (offset)
• In the story proper, the text is crammed/wrapped around the illustrations, blank spaces 
• Chapter 1 of Inaka Genji takes us through a building, much like 'tale of the rat'
• Narrative's forward propelling resembles handscroll 'unrolling' experience
• Sometimes illustrations play with handscroll, injecting it into the story
• Aware of own status as a book - meta
• Eg 'folding' a page in illustration
• Addresses the reader
• Theatre stage-like compositions: 3 dimensionality/trompe l'oeil
• Character illustrations sometimes reference contemporary actors' ukiyo-e prints
• Characters names indicated with medallion logo: visual symbols that exist outside narrative world (extra-diegetic)
• Also small symbols to guide reader for text 
• Interactions between images: telescope --> looing into the telescope represented by circle
• New visual devices to play with perspective
• Maximum potential for storytelling

------ 

Tyberg, Jamie, 'Unlearning: From Degrowth to Decolonisation', Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York Office (May 2020): http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/degrowthfinal.pdf

• AOC's Green New Deal not entirely convincing: IPCC (2018) says we must radically transform to avoid climate catastrophe
• Must start in the US: biggest consumer, least green
• Need to remove military, police, and stop US imperialism
• "A materialist approach, in the tradition of Epicurus and Marx, would interrogate the contradictions of infinite consumption of energy on a planet with finite resources" (4) 
• Degrowth resists idea of 'infinite growth'
• Degrowth is designed for arrivants and settlers (as opposed to indigenous)
• Degrowth started as social critique, now a "fully - fledged alternative to it" (4)
• Tiffany Lethabo King's The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies calling for new ideas of society and new formulations of hte future
• The end goal of degrowht (as a process of unlearning) as decolonisation
• Sylvia Wynter: "nomadic or sedentary indigenous traditionally stateless societies" (Q5) like Masai, San, Pygmy as examples
• Rejecting Western ideas of care work as gendered: "care is fundamental in supporting the mental, physical, and relational integrity of each and every human being and our ecosystems" (5-6)
• Care-based economy
• Autonomy vs. independence: A. as inherently collective (including collective restraint)
• "argues against technological solutions to the crisis" (6)
• Sufficiency: satisfy all human needs; redistribute surplus energy for community benefit
• Need to unlearn individualism
• Degrowth as new epistemology - rewriting our current institutionalised knowledge
• Degrowth = care + autonomy + sufficiency
• Mutual aid responses to Covid is good but inherently short-term (unsustainable)
• Red Deal proposed by The Red Nation - 10 point program
• Degrowth is "a set of practices".

summer reading notes 4 - edX japanese books 2

Module 2 introduction

• Scroll format for illustrated narratives
• Cinematic - temporal component which can be controlled by both reader (unrolling) and artist (pacing of narrative)
• Including 'different time same scene' (iji dozu) where 2 different moments are shown side by side
• Ko-e (short story small scrolls)
• Tale of the Rat (Nezumi soshi) and Chrysanthemum Spirit (Kiku no sei monogatari)
• Usually 15cm high (half size of standard scroll)
• Text-image-text-image: condensed impact
• Emerged in C14 but peaked C15-16
• Illustrates a short story from a collection - anticipating a modern viewing/reading experience as individual engagement
• Single protagonist, plot-driven, epiphanic ending
• Didactic - for young readers as hobby
• Lent out and exchanged among peers

Tale of the Rat (C16) - 3 paintings

• Unroll so you only see 1 portion at a time - shoulder-width, held in hands
• Fluid text - easy to read (kana and kanji)
• Overlaps with painting section at the start - dreamlike introduction
• Opens with gate illustration: beckons reader into another world
• Poor household: no roof, dilapidated
• Daughter of nun wants/needs to be married - makes a wish
• Painting supplements text: extra information
• Woman pounding cloth - allusion to noh theatre motif of woman beckoning for lost husband, full of longing = indicates theme
• Sleeping dog = peaceful household
• Straw mat = presages new visitor
• Architecture plays important framing role for characters, themes, setting
• Proscenium: stage set for story
• Young courtier appears in front of daughter
• Autumn scene: poetic
• Section 2: Courtier continues visits, enriches household and provides luxurious objects, food, repairs
• Frontal view of architecture = stability of household
• Section 3: sequence showing revelation of cat eating rat, to the sadness of the women who feel that it is Karma/destiny
• Temporal rhythm: slow/poetic intro --> dramatic ending, then moment of reflection (Buddhist: becoming aware of illusory nature of world)
• Final scene's architecture is intimate, allowing visceral engagement

Comparing ko-e

• Rat: text/image divided page by page, with professional art
• Chrysanthemum: looser, calligraphy and art more fluid, uses juxtaposition of image/text
• Both about women's encounters with non-human men - both didactic
• Chrysanthemum is about imperial ideology and importance of perpetuating aristocratic lineage

The Chrysanthemum Spirit

• Woman becomes lovers with spirit of the chrysanthemum but he is plucked for the emperor
• Dies giving birth to their child, but daughter becomes consort to emperor and has prosperous children
• In painting, flowers in garden are diverse and large, swaying
• All important for evoking in poetry - primer for flowers for youths
• No buildings - relationships told/visualised interpersonally
• Metamorphosis of chrysanthemum spirit is evident visually to the reader, though the character does not know 
• Birthing scene unusual as it actually shows baby emerging from her robe - more explicit, hints at didactic nature of scroll
• Ends on a note of regeneration - descendants, perpetuation of imperial line/lineage in general.