Diasporic/Decolonized Archives
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Summary: Decolonizing Cosmopolitianism: Havana Archives, 1959-68
Isabel Alfonso and Susan Lord
The new forms of belonging and engagement available to women, racialized
minorities, and newly decolonized peoples in the 1960s in many parts of
the world were quickly threatened by national, colonial and patriarchal
traditions that formed both their context and their subjective terrain.
The political landscape of Latin America in the 1960s was characterized
by the philosophy of liberation, the development of popular and
independence movements, the Cold War, a bipolar World, and U.S. military
interventions to impose economic and political dependence. Cuba’s
social and cultural experimentation in the 1960s has been cast into the
shadow of other historical events with which it is associated (UMAP; the
Missile Crisis; Bay of Pigs); however, Havana in the 1960s saw an
intensification of the role culture played in the making of citizens and
a simultaneous connectivity to the global imaginary, producing a new
possible form of cosmopolitanism through networks made across previously
unbridgeable cultural, social and national borders. The broad and
general objective of this research is to bring to light those
connectivities and theorize the underlying imaginary of a decolonized
form of cosmopolitanism. By “decolonized cosmopolitanism” we mean to
point to an attitude and a material condition of belonging to a world
made by those who for centuries had no “world” to which to belong. With
this term as our probe, we seek a better understanding of the limits and
expediencies of culture in efforts to transform citizenship from its
function in the liberal order of individuals, nation-states,
nationalisms, and the markets that mediate each to each, toward that of
an active participant in the making of a new society.
The Cuban Revolution - only four years after the meetings in Bandung,
Indonesia - promised to bring to the word “citizenship” the agency and
freedom stripped from it by colonialism and imperialism. Political
theorists, activists, journalists, philosophers, poets, painters,
filmmakers, students, came to Havana from Paris, Montreal, Santiago,
Harlem, Rome, Istanbul, Berlin (East and West), Moscow, Buenos Aires,
Kingston (Jamaica), and other capitals to see and to participate in a
new world in the making. In the same moment, the citizen became defined
around a particular form of hetero-militancy, and the invitations to
“the world” were in tension with the discipline and incarceration of gay
Cubans. These inner tensions within the possibility of decolonizing
cosmopolitanism are at the centre of our work. These large and general
concerns about culture and citizenship will be grounded in the visual
culture of Havana during its most open period as a decolonized
cosmopolitan centre, from 1959 (the triumph of the revolution) to 1968
(the beginning of what are known as the "grey years" of Sovietization of
culture and society).
Radical Recovery: Documenting the Undocumented in South Asian American History
Vivek Bald
Both before and after the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone Act “closed the
doors” to Asian immigration, many other groups of South Asian migrants
came to and made their lives in the United States, including performers,
students, nurses, political exiles, and the children of Indian
indentured laborers from the Caribbean. This paper/presentation will
focus on two such groups – peddlers and seamen – who, between the 1890s
and 1940s, came to the U.S. in the thousands. These migrants were
predominantly Muslim men from regions of present-day Bangladesh and
Indian West Bengal. They entered the United States through Eastern ports
and moved through the U.S. Northeast, Midwest, and South, building
clandestine networks, navigating racial segregation, and living in the
shadows of the immigration laws. They settled within African American
and Puerto Rican communities in U.S. cities, where many married local
women and started families; their children grew up as part of
neighborhoods such as Tremé, Black Bottom, and Harlem, from the 1910s
through the 1970s. Their histories of collective life-making on the
racialized margins of the United States are not recorded in any
straightforward existing archive. The peddlers and seamen for the most
part were non-literate and did not leave behind letters, writings, or
first hand accounts, and under the immigration laws of their day, their
first imperative was to become invisible to the authorities. The traces
of their travels, work, relationships, and settlement thus exist in
hundreds of scattered and fragmentary archival records – ship manifests;
census sheets; marriage, birth, and death certificates – and in the
memories and personal photographs of their descendants within
contemporary African American and Puerto Rican communities. My
presentation will center on the archival practices that I have followed
in an effort to recover and represent these histories across various
media. I will discuss the process of connecting disparate archival
records – many originally intended as means of state surveillance and
control – in order to map the presence of South Asian Muslims in U.S.
neighborhoods of color; to trace out their global and local networks;
and to understand the crucial role that African American and Puerto
Rican women played in the functioning of these ostensibly “South Asian”
networks. I will also discuss the development of a web-based alternative
archive - an online space in which the children and descendants of
South Asian- African American-Puerto Rican families are contributing
stories and images to build an ongoing, expanding, multi-vocal account
of their own histories.
Indigenous Peoples Living Archive
John Bradley and Shannon Faulkhead
The Monash Country Lines Archive (MCLA)
is working with the concept of a ‘living archive’ as a decolonised
space, where Indigenous Australian communities are confident in storing
their knowledge and records. Through the development of partnerships
with Indigenous communities across Australia, the MCLA is using cutting
edge 3D animation technologies to assist in the preservation of their
history, knowledge, poetry, songs, performance and language. These
animations provide material for Elders and younger generations to sit
together and share knowledge. The affective responses to seeing
technology re-represent back to them stories that have deep cultural
resonances, has resulted in growing interest from others. This has
reinforced our hope that through the use of technology, this project
will support existing Indigenous archives and not subsume them. This
method of archiving is groundbreaking and exciting not only for
Indigenous communities, but also for academics and archivists worldwide.
Legacies of the Ghadar di Goonj
Rosie Kar
In the early twentieth century, the Ghadar di Goonj, translated as
“Echoes of Mutiny” or “Calls to Revolution,” were produced by the Ghadar
Party in San Francisco. This series of papers, consisting of poetry
and op-ed articles, were circulated throughout the United States and the
globe, articulating the need for action, cooperation, and response to
injustice and mistreatment. The first appearance of South Asians in the
American imagination and public was in the labor communities of the West
Coast, made visible by the activities of the Ghadar Party. However,
many of these archives are fractured, incomplete, and inaccessible. This
paper situates and exposits on the links between the experiences of
colonized people, specifically those under the rule of the British Raj,
who were also the first South Asian Americans to form communities
committed to revolution in the United States, and the current legacies
of radical
politics and activism present in California. Faced with discriminatory
laws brought against them, and mass amounts of injustice and
mistreatment by the American public, laborers and students sought to
create safe spaces for themselves, out of which emerged the Ghadar
Party, inclusive of all South Asians,
regardless of religious affiliation. First, I postulate an exposition
on the Ghadar party and its literature; as the first signs of “brown” in
the American imaginary, their activities were localized, but their
intentions were for larger, radical action. They wished to break away
from the yoke of the British Raj, to engender equality and safe working
conditions, and to be part of the privileged group of Americans who
enjoyed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. While they were
not necessarily part of the multicultural national imagined community,
their revolutionary activities did not go unnoticed, and they were
placed under mediated and severe surveillance by the U.S. government,
under the urging of British colonial power, guided by Orientalist
discursive formations. Their activities were broadened to a national
scale in the domain of the law, with the sensational case of Bhagat
Singh Thind making an indelible mark on the constitution of brownness in
the United States. How are they remembered in
historical and literary canons? How can we recover fractured,
mistranslated archives? How were the intersectionalities of race, class,
gender, and sexuality reflected in their work? How does affective
archiving resonate within silenced histories? How do we recover those
archives, working in piecemeal fashion, in translation, to honor their
legacies and? Although the Ghadar Party’s goals were ultimately not
realized in an imagined mass revolution, their ideologies around social
justice remain intact, inspiring young, progressive South Asian
Americans to act today. Their legacy is continued through organizations
like South Asians for Justice-Los Angeles, Alliance of South Asians
Taking Action, Bay Area Solidarity Summer, and South Asian Sisters.
South Asian Americans occupy a specific locale in the current American
imaginary, often falling into the category of the model minority, but
are also placed under surveillance under current tenets of Islamophobia.
Are You Recording This?: Haitian Expressions, Translations and Art
Grace L. Sanders Johnson
This paper is a meditation on archival meaning and making in Haiti and
the Haitian diaspora. Using the interviews of Haitian women in Haiti,
Canada, and the United States, this paper considers the intersection
between memory, voice, and art. The paper focuses on the author’s
ongoing public installation titled Vwa Fanm/La Voix des Femmes (Women’s
Voice) that responds to the archival silences regarding Haitian women’s
lives in the written historical record. Vwa Fanm is an oral history
archive that uses visual art and sound to provide a multi-sensory record
of migration, love, violence, and family in twentieth century Haiti and
the diaspora. Guided by the recurring question “Are you recording
this?,” this paper uses Vwa Fanm to consider the desire, excitement, and
apprehension of preserving experience. The presentation will consider
“safe” mediums of archiving Haitian women’s lives and alternative
representations of “the archive” that are useful in documenting the
multiple registers of history.
Vivek Bald is a documentary filmmaker, writer and scholar whose work focuses on histories of the South Asian diaspora. His films include "Taxi-vala/Auto-biography," (1994) which explored the lives, struggles, and activism of New York City taxi drivers from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and "Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music" (2003) a hybrid music documentary/social documentary about South Asian youth, music, and anti-racist politics in 1970s-90s Britain. Bald is currently working on a transmedia project aimed at recovering the histories of peddlers and steamship workers from British colonial India who came to the United States during the Asian exclusion era and settled within U.S. communities of color. The project consists of a book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013); a documentary film, “In Search of Bengali Harlem,” (currently in production); and a digital oral history website being developed at
losthistoriesproject.com. Bald is co-editor, with Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery, of the recently published collection, The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). He has also begun work on a second single-author book, about fantasies of India in American consumer culture at the turn of the twentieth century, centering on the epic story of the United States’ first curry chef. Bald is Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Rosie Kar graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, having earned her Master’s and PhD from the Comparative Literature Program, with a doctoral emphasis in Feminist Studies. Her dissertation was entitled "What Can Brown Do for You? Citizenship and Desire: The South Asian Diasporic Body.” While at UC Santa Barbara, she taught in the Comparative Literature Program, the Department of Asian American Studies, the Department of Feminist Studies, and the Writing Program. She also graduated from the Summer Institute on Sexuality, Culture, and Society, from the University of Amsterdam. She now teaches in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, at California State University, Long Beach, where her courses center on popular culture, women writers of color, and women's health and sexuality. Her scholarly research is on the intersections of literary studies, critical race theory, feminist theory, history, media studies, social justice and activism, and popular culture, which has allowed her to develop interdisciplinary strengths in both the humanities and social sciences, including South Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, Subaltern Studies, Diasporic Studies, New Sexuality Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and post-colonial theory. She is a writer, poet, social justice advocate, documentary filmmaker, and a core member of South Asians for Justice, Los Angeles. She has published in the most recent iteration of Asian Americans: An Encyclopedia of Social, Cultural, Economic, and Political History, for the Asian American Women Artist's Association, and
YoDesh.com.
Susan Lord is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Affiliated with the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies, as well as the Departments of Art and Gender Studies, she researches in the areas of cinema and media arts; cosmopolitanism; new media, gendered spaces and the city; and Cuban cinema and visual culture. She has undertaken curatorial projects of media arts, worked with artists groups and artist-run centres for over 20 years. She has been a member of the Public Access collective since 1995. Public Access is an artist-run collective that publishes PUBLIC: art, culture, ideas. PUBLIC has provided a forum combining critical thinking with visual art for over 20 years producing an aesthetically engaging journal which explores themes in-depth in each issue. Susan has published three books: (with Janine Marchessault) Fluid Screens: Expanded Cinema and Digital Cultures. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007; Paperback edition 2008; (with Annette Burfoot) Killing Women: Gender, Violence and Representation. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006; (with K. Dubinsky, C. Krull, S. Mills, S. Rutherford) New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness. Palgrave and Between the Lines Press, 2009.
Maria Isabel Alfonso (Saint Joseph’s College, Long Island Campus, NY) is a specialist on the 1960s in Cuba, focusing on the publishing project of the writers’ collective El Puente. [Dinámicas culturales de los años sesenta en Cuba: Ediciones El Puente y otras zonas creativas de conflicto]. She is one of the only people to have published on this artist group and she has developed an extensive archive on the race politics of that period.
Grace L. Sanders Johnson is a historian and art archivist. Currently, she works as a Postdoctoral Fellow for Academic Diversity at the University of Pennsylvania, Department of Africana Studies where she specializes in Modern Caribbean and Latin American History, Transnational Feminisms, and Oral History, with a focus on Haitian women’s history. Through her research in Haiti and Canada, Grace worked with the Haiti Group in Concordia University’s Oral History Project Histoire de Vie, where she co-produced an oral archive on violence and Haitian migration to Canada. In addition to her study of twentieth century gender, sexuality, migration, and Haitian women's social and political organizing, Grace is collaborating with colleagues in Haiti and throughout the diaspora to establish a Haitian women’s oral history archive.
Dr. Shannon Faulkhead’s research concentrates on the location of Koorie peoples and their knowledge within the broader Australian society and its collective knowledge as reflected through narratives and records. To date Shannon’s multi- disciplinary research has centred on community and archival collections of records. As the Finkel Fellow, attached to Monash Country Lines Archive, Monash University, will allow for greater exploration and development in the area of Indigenous archiving.
Dr. John Bradley is the Deputy Director of the Monash Indigenous Centre and has worked for 35 years in the Northern Territory of Australia. His research has centred on working with Indigenous peoples to record their own Indigenous knowledges in ways that are useful to them. He has also worked on a number of land and sea claims assisting Indigenous peoples in regaining their traditional lands. More recently he has been developing ways in which his own field work can be returned to Indigenous communities, the animations project of which his is the director has been a part of this.
Q&A
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