nineteen sixty nine: an ethnic studies journal

Reflecting on this special issue’s critical questions, NSN’s assistant editor Kristen Sun conducts a brief interview with executive editors Kim Tran and Maria Faini about Ethnic Studies today.

Discourses on racism in Europe have largely been dominated by a US-centric lens that serves to universalize the North American experience of racism. This decenters the different historical and geographical experiences European contexts have had with continuing racist legacies as well as the multiple ways in which anti-racism can challenge such legacies. It also allows European societies to continue to construct a self-image that displaces racism onto other geographical contexts or isolates it as a purely historical phenomenon. In order to reveal and counter the mechanisms of this displacement and isolation, we want to argue that three specific socio-historical developments have produced distinctive articulations of racism that differ significantly from North American understandings of both race and anti-racism. Whereas in the US context, where the post-race discourse is constituted by a speaking through race, dominant European socialities either detach from race as a social category of domination and/or interpret it as a historical phenomenon.

By unpacking the construction of a national imaginary that erases racism, interrogating the assumed turn from biological to what is sometimes referred to as cultural racism, and examining the (bio)politics of the welfare state, we aim to elucidate modern forms of European racism that call into question the view of Europe as not a racist space. Drawing specifically on the contexts of France, the Netherlands and Germany, we demonstrate the importance of conceptualizing racism as an intersectional, dynamic phenomenon bound to spatial and temporal meanings and signifiers. In the process, we reveal the ways race and racism formulate themselves differently within European spaces over and against the United States in order to challenge the silence about race in Europe and transnationalize our understandings of the various articulations of racism in different socio-historical contexts.

My art is personal and humanistic, encompassing social, political and spiritual approaches to my life experience. I am intent on dispensing information as an underlying part of my artistic expression. My collages and assemblages directly confront my audience, immediately and holistically engaging them in a visual discourse.

My draftsmanship of narrative figurative realism is influenced by master draftsmen Charles White and John Biggers, while my use of assemblage and collage is influenced by German photomontage artist John Heartfield, Romare Bearden, Benny Andrews, and the Los Angeles assemblage movement of the 1960s and 70s of which Black artists were at the center.

I also incorporate digital art in my compositions. In combining these genres, I have created a singular style, which defies categorization, yet is both cutting-edge and traditional. I seek to evolve traditional art forms with a digital collaboration by creating compositions that visually change perceptions and inspire dialogue within and beyond the diaspora. I focus on aesthetic quality of technique in my use of traditional and multi-media.

My art is the result of a creative continuum—eternal expressions in artistic terms, and natural interactions in human terms—of the genre of life experiences, through a diasporic and universal lens.

My work is about the distance created by compounded loss and the opacity of language. Using photography and video, I explore moments of pause that are filled with vulnerability, silence and contradiction.

Moving from Iran to the U.S. revealed an in-between state about distance; I never fully arrived and never fully left. There is always something in between which is dysfunctional and paralyzing. Something is always missing. To show this void, I use cutout letters and self-portraits to focus on paradoxical emotions in dealing with distance and loss. I am fascinated by the human face and the silence in portraiture because the face has complicated our idea of identity and rootedness.

Often my portraits are captured in a mundane domestic setting with confronting gaze, exploring personal and communal loss. Language is another distance, especially when it comes to translation. Translation makes you nauseous and numb; you become a different person in another culture; you silence the things you are good at and become shy, polite, apologetic, stupid, weak, and self conscious. Language itself is a void in communication. I intentionally avoid translation in my work to take access away from my audience, making them feel like alien to the language- to illustrate how language fails us when we need to communicate and how some words and expressions are untranslatable. This is a very common and difficult experience in every immigrant’s life.

This series, is a visual narrative based on poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, one of Iran’s most controversial female poets of the 1950’s and 60’s. In her poems she discusses contradictory feelings women experience in their daily lives; such as hope and despair, desire and repulsion, and captivity and freedom. For example, she describes herself as a prisoner who has fallen in love with her prison guard, or a bird who does not want to leave the cage. She uses metaphor to better capture details and moments which are often overlooked. For this project I chose lines from Forugh’s poems that resonated with my own feelings of alienation, loss and distance. Then I cut Farsi words out of paper, fabric and latex gloves. The act of cutting out letters was very therapeutic for me because during that period, I was grieving the loss of my mother. This became a metaphor for my own frustration and anger over the geographical distance and her absence.

The series also examines cross-cultural literature about the woman’s role in society and family, the emotional and physical distance they feel in daily life, contradiction over having multiple identities, honor versus labor and the concept of reward. Moving through time and geography, I will continue to explore themes surrounding distance, loss, language and identity in my work. Each time, I approach the work with a new perspective in the hopes of removing borders and creating relatable, empathic, transparent and translatable experiences.

My art practice is informed by reverse ethnography, explores themes from my own personal biography, and is explicitly political. It utilizes my personal experience as a lens onto the persistent effects of social institutions and cultural practices on the individual. Immigration, AIDS, and queer identity are at the forefront of my work. Through my practice, I aim not only able to reclaim my personal narrative, but to creatively reconstruct history. I do this through the reassembly of imagery: colonial propaganda, indigenous codexes, consumer print media. Additionally, I create new iconography presenting alternative and relevant understandings of colonialism, culture, and sex.Using printmaking I recreated religious imagery, mimicking the same process of documentation through printmaking originally used by the Catholic Church to disseminate their religious ideas.  Using these same tools, my work proposed a critique of religious institutions and social control. I highlighted the condemned and the excluded by drawing together homosexuality and Pre­Columbian artifacts in a hybrid form. These objects and images are clearly personal, but they also speak to broader issues that are relevant today. Belonging to a population that is often excluded and condemned, printmaking became a response to the exclusionary history books, religious propaganda populating my upbringing.

My work straddles non-objectivist and abstractionist approaches to art production. Abstraction uses the real to interpret and reinterpret the known world, while a non-objective method refuses the real and instead uses the elements of art to make art, disregarding the actual.  This construct is similar to the relationship between popular, classical music, and jazz. Difference here is presented through these forms. Why is abstraction misunderstood and jazz so readily understood? I suggest that because African Americans invented jazz its non-objectivity and abstraction are taken for granted and abstraction is presumed a European construction  Abstraction in the visual and plastic arts is misrecognized as incomprehensible when in fact, abstraction in the visual is imbued with similar elements as jazz; elements such as call and response, movement,, and color create, and orchestrate a compositional whole that results in a musical composition or a two dimensional composition of color, lines, and shapes.

There continue to be few African American artists involved in abstraction because of its poor reception by multiple communities.  I assert that non-objective art was developed out of African motifs, (remember Picasso’s appropriation of African motifs for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon?).  Aaron Douglas was the first American, and African American, to make use of African motifs. His work should be understood as non-objective in design and abstract in content. Earlier I stated that abstraction refers to the real, Douglas’ stylized figures were abstract, and his background geometric forms non-objective. Contemporary African American abstract/non-objective art’s historicism is grounded in the work of Aaron Douglas.

It has always been a penchant of mine to look at the particulars of what I see around me and reinterpret them. I use various scientific theories developed out of astrophysics, microbiology, space-time and mathematics. I wonder about cognitive science and how the eye interprets what we see; what do those signs and signifiers mean? Can the signs we take for granted be understood in some other way?

In my latest work, “The Butterfly House” and “Hoot and Holler,” I use natural forms. The forms lend themselves to becoming other than that which they are. Rocks have their own history and evolutionary processes; they make their way up to the surface by natural forces, or by human beings unearthing them. They are heavy, smooth, rough and bound, too, by gravity. Yet in the mind and hands of someone like me, rocks can fly through the air, through space. What is the color of a rock? Can the color of a rock that flies, leaving the earth’s orbit, change its nature, its color? In the hands and mind of some, that rock laden and buried attains agency, and with the help of an artist whose effort is to make something a little bit interesting opens a door to a new way of being, thinking and looking.

I was born and raised in Japan to Chinese parents and have immigrated to U.S. when I was ten years  old.  I have since moved and resided all over the states. However, because of my travels I have forgotten the majority of my old tradition as what may be called my “old culture.” However, one thing that I have dearly hung onto from my past was a hideous Godzilla toy I owned since I was three years old.  Growing up, I was fascinated by the campy and terrible giant monster films, but I couldn't help but notice that wherever Godzilla traveled, he was always attacked by the locals.  Relating to the feelings of being attacked and lonely, I painted Godzilla to speak of my struggles with stereotypes and racism, which in turn became a metaphor for my life.  These paintings represent my observation of our various cultures across America. ­­

I was born and raised in Japan to Chinese parents and have immigrated to U.S. when I was ten years  old.  I have since moved and resided all over the states. However, because of my travels I have forgotten the majority of my old tradition as what may be called my “old culture.” However, one thing that I have dearly hung onto from my past was a hideous Godzilla toy I owned since I was three years old.  Growing up, I was fascinated by the campy and terrible giant monster films, but I couldn't help but notice that wherever Godzilla traveled, he was always attacked by the locals.  Relating to the feelings of being attacked and lonely, I painted Godzilla to speak of my struggles with stereotypes and racism, which in turn became a metaphor for my life.  These paintings represent my observation of our various cultures across America. ­­

Something entirely fictions and true, that creeps across your path hallowing your evil ways. –Amiri Baraka

My art is an investigation of my cultural identity through the exploration of power as it relates to social stratification. My desire is to create art pieces that serve as a backdrop for a mythology on which I question the ecology of low income communities of color and their relation with other social classes as well as the perception of the people within those communities. My work is heavily influenced by sci-fi literature such as Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451. I believe themes in science fiction are analogous to the contemporary Black experience in America. Being the descendants of a people who were stolen from their home- taken to a new distant world and over generations evolved to survive their extreme circumstances. Therefore, I have created a world of mythical beings in a number of different mediums that personify the complexity within hierarchies of power in everyday life.

These entities which are hybrids of appropriated 19^th century animal illustrations, objects within my and environment and my hand drawn figures from contemporary Black culture, are in the vein of the Dadaist, who appropriated and recontexualized images from society in order to make “anti-art”. Namely Hans Arp, who considered the destruction of “signs” as a subversive act.  The signs I’m interested in are the tropes associated with the Black body within the American psyche.

These entities are inspired by personal experiences from a rural working class, upbringing, in Red Springs, North Carolina, such as seeing childhood friends mutate into drug dealers then disappear into the streets. I am creating a mythology for my hometown in these gods and goddesses that are the personification of a psychology that is a result of one’s particular placement within the social ladder.  Inspired by Amiri Baraka poem “Something in the Way of Things”, these beings live in the intangible spaces that exist between the nuances of class and race. They are both born of and perpetuate the actions and thought processes due to social reproduction.  Within my paintings and collages, we have these mythical beings interacting with each other to suggest a narrative. They exist in an abstracted purgatory.

The deities themselves are collages of signifiers of contemporary Blackness and tradition western colonial motifs.  In my installations, the use of a found objects such as shovels, sheet-rock and tires can signify the industries of agriculture, construction and factory labor that are specific to my memories of Red Springs. These utilitarian objects are placed with the wheat-pasted figures along walls. Wheat-paste which has a history of being a lost cost method of political activism that communicates a particular ideology to a large number of people.  The deities enchant and interact with the 3 dimensional objects, activating them in way that speaks to socioeconomic conditions of a specific geographic region.